Open source standards are critical to organizations wanting to adopt
cloud native, but complexity and skill gaps are among the biggest
barriers to adoption across the enterprise environment. With this in
mind,
Chronosphere has partnered with Julius Volz,
co-founder of Prometheus and creator of the PromQL query builder
PromLens, to donate PromLens to the Prometheus Organization. PromLens
significantly lowers PromQL's notoriously steep learning curve and
provides greater visibility over the query-building process, making it
faster and easier to use Prometheus.
Chronosphere is the only cloud native observability platform putting
engineering organizations back in control by taming rampant data growth
and cloud native complexity. Chronosphere first collaborated with Volz
in 2021 to tackle the challenges of open source standards accessibility
when it embedded PromLens into its Query Builder,
which offers a quick and simple way to write and troubleshoot PromQL
queries. This initiative extends that collaboration in an effort to ease
the burden on engineers who already spend too much time wading through
massive volumes of metrics data - in fact, according to an upcoming
Chronosphere survey, 25% of the 500 surveyed engineers feel that
observability query languages are too complex, and 32% believe
observability tools in general are too complex for new engineers.
PromLens can help Prometheus users across the spectrum - for those
engineers new to Prometheus, PromLens features easy-to-interpret,
graphical ways to understand language and syntax. Both beginners and
experts can rapidly build and analyze queries by having clear views of
underlying data.
"For companies to reach their cloud native goals, they need solutions
that will make Prometheus easier and faster for their engineers to
use," said Martin Mao, CEO of
Chronosphere. "Currently too much engineering bandwidth is spent trying
to understand and harness the collected metrics. We started
collaborating with Julius in 2021 with the goal of removing the high
barrier to entry for PromQL users. We made significant progress towards
that goal with the launch of our PromLens-based Query Builder in the
Chronosphere platform and are building upon that ease-of-use mindset by
donating PromLens to the Prometheus community. It's not often that an
organization will donate a fully functional tool to open source under
the permissive apache license, but we feel this will help engineers
spend less time crafting and troubleshooting PromQL queries and more
time generating valuable outcomes for their teams."
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. 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 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
"Working with Chronosphere, we're reaching our goal of making
PromLens open source," said Volz. "We share a mission to remove needless
complexity and frustration from querying metrics, and this donation
will go a long way towards making this a reality for Prometheus users."
"Successful cloud native observability is contingent on the ability
of the Prometheus community to easily grasp languages to query and
visualize metrics," said Chris Aniszczyk,
Chief Technology Officer of CNCF. "This open source upstream
contribution from Chronosphere and PromLabs will help make Prometheus
query building possible for engineers with all levels of experience."
PromLens is now available in the Prometheus Organization at https://github.com/prometheus/promlens