Chronosphere and PromLabs donate PromLens to Prometheus organization

Since its founding, Chronosphere has been helping central observability teams and engineers use cloud native observability to tame rampant data growth, perform their jobs more effectively, and be happier in their work. And of course, happier and more productive engineers translate to better outcomes for customers and your business –  both of whom rely on the software that engineers build and support. To further these goals, Chronosphere announced on Prometheus Day that we, together with PromLabs, are donating PromLens to the Prometheus organization.

Chronosphere’s partnership with Prometheus co-founder and PromLabs founder, Julius Volz, dates back to 2021 when Chronosphere introduced Query Builder as part of the Chronosphere Observability platform. Based on PromLens, Query Builder provides a way to quickly create and analyze queries in PromQL. Chronosphere and Julius have always shared a common goal of making open source standards for cloud native observability easier to adopt and use. This donation of PromLens to the open source community affirms Chronosphere’s and Julius’s commitment to open source and helping engineers spend less time crafting and troubleshooting PromQL queries and more time generating positive business outcomes.

So why donate PromLens now? It’s not often that a vendor will donate a fully functional tool to the open source community under the permissive Apache license. However, one of the biggest challenges to open source adoption is the complexity and skills gap. The customers and prospects we talk to all recognize the need to move away from proprietary platforms for cloud native observability. Donating PromLens will make it easier to get started, easier to use, and bring more people into Prometheus and open source monitoring.

Engineers can now ramp up on the cloud native industry standard query language, PromQL, and learn a transferable skill instead of spending time crafting and troubleshooting queries. It’s of particular benefit to intermediate and advanced users who need a PromQL power tool that shows them the data they are working with at every point of the query building process. It mitigates frustrations and gives them the ability to edit queries based on the underlying data confidently. It lets them surface all the data interactions within the structure of a query while building or debugging it.

PromLens will now be part of the Prometheus organization, which is owned by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and free to anyone to use as a standalone query building app. PromLens is published in the Prometheus organization as a standalone tool but will be embedded in the Prometheus project in the near future. Benefits of PromLens include the ability to:

• Edit Confidently: Best-in-class autocompletion, highlighting and inline linting while typing an expression.
• Build Visually: Ability to create and modify a PromQL query using a form-based editor
• Debug and Fix: Enter and fix any PromQL query and visualize all of its sub-expressions as a tree
• X-Ray Data: Deeper insights about the values of any label in the tree, along with their number of occurrences
• Detect Hints and Actions: View common query patterns and pitfalls, with warning hints and actions

For more information on PromLens, read Julius Volz’s blog, visit PromLabs, Prometheus.io, or visit Chronosphere.io for a demo of Chronosphere Query Builder.