- The OSS product
- The Storage Format (I guess)
- The Interface for pulling metrics (https://github.com/OpenObservability/OpenMetrics)
I haven't dug into cortex even a little, but the other comments are suggesting it's API compatible but essentially claiming they're production ready because they'll give you things the OSS project won't give you out of the box, i.e. long term storage and RBAC.
Looks like a good thing.
No! Prometheus is and has been production ready for many years. Cortex is a clustered/horizontally scalable implemention of the Prometheus APIs, and Cortex has just gone production ready. Sorry for the confusion.
But readiness depends somewhat on your use case. If you're on a multi-tenanted cluster and you don't want to explicit trust your users / admins, how do you stop them from messing with your metrics whilst allowing them to maintain their own?
I typically did it via github flow, some others used the operator to give us many proms, some others would just suggest it's missing features.
Indeed, I could probably word my example better though. Apologies if I were putting words in your mouth.