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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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In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 14, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud network observability... 

While companies adopt AI at a record pace, they also face the challenge of finding a smart and scalable way to manage its rapidly growing costs. This requires balancing the massive possibilities inherent in AI with the need to control cloud costs, aim for long-term profitability and optimize spending ...

Telecommunications is expanding at an unprecedented pace ... But progress brings complexity. As WanAware's 2025 Telecom Observability Benchmark Report reveals, many operators are discovering that modernization requires more than physical build outs and CapEx — it also demands the tools and insights to manage, secure, and optimize this fast-growing infrastructure in real time ...

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

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