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Chronosphere and PromLabs Make the PromLens Query Builder Open Source for All

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.

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."

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Chronosphere and PromLabs Make the PromLens Query Builder Open Source for All

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.

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."

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...