OpenMetrics

Creating OpenMetrics within CNCF was a given.

- Richard “RichiH” Hartmann, director of community at Grafana Labs and OpenMetrics founder.

What is OpenMetrics?

It specifies the de-facto standard for transmitting cloud-native metrics at scale, with support for both text representation and Protocol Buffers. OpenMetrics is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project. OpenMetrics creates an open standard for transmitting cloud-native metrics at scale. It acts as an open standard for Prometheus and is the officially supported exposition format for the project and compatible solutions.

Metrics are a specific kind of telemetry data, and when combined with logs and traces, provide a comprehensive view of the performance of cloud native applications.

OpenMetrics was spun out of Prometheus to provide a specification and de-facto standard format for metrics.

It is used or supported by most CNCF projects and many wider cloud native ecosystem projects. Furthermore, any changes are considered closely with Cortex, Prometheus, Kubernetes, and Thanos.

OpenMetrics is used in production by many large enterprises, including GitLab, DoorDash, Grafana Labs, Chronosphere, Everquote, and SoundCloud. 

OpenMetrics stems from the stats formats used inside of Prometheus and Google’s Monarch time-series infrastructure, which underpins both Stackdriver and internal monitoring applications.

Learn

Learn more about OpenMetrics from the official documentation

Learn more about Prometheus from the official documentation