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."
The Latest
Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...
The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...
As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...
We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...
Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...
Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...
For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...
FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...
Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...
While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...