Today, during PromCon at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual, we are excited to announce the intent to form the Prometheus Conformance Program. The conformance program will ensure that every version of Prometheus, the systems and service monitoring system for cloud native delivers consistency and portability. 

The program will be modeled after the successful Certified Kubernetes Conformance Program, which now has nearly 140 certified offerings. There will be two types of conformance certification – Component Compliance, which currently consists of three compliance tests for OpenMetrics, PromQL, and Remote Write – and Prometheus Compatibility. Prometheus Compatible projects and products will be able to display a Prometheus Compatibility logo and use Prometheus in the product name.

Today, Prometheus is used widely in production by organizations like Adidas, Slack, JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, and Uber. It was the second project to join CNCF in 2016 and the second project to graduate in 2018, following only Kubernetes. Since joining CNCF, the number of companies contributing code to Prometheus has increased by more than 500%, from 202 to over 1,200. As the project has seen a growing commercial ecosystem of implementers and adopters, a need has emerged to address the conformance across these implementations, both commercial and open source. 

“High-velocity open source projects like Prometheus, which is in the top three CNCF projects in terms of velocity, garner wide adoption and contribution levels from vendor and end user communities alike,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “When a project achieves this level of growth, it’s critical to ensure that vendors and communities are offering the most up-to-date version of the software and support conformance across a variety of vendors. We encourage the wider Prometheus community to get involved with the conformance program.” 

For end users, the introduction of the Prometheus Conformance Program will enable interoperability from one Prometheus installation to the next and provide flexibility to easily switch between vendors. It provides consistency when interacting with any installation of Prometheus and ensures access to the latest features and updates. 

“Since the project was created in 2012, the Prometheus team has worked to create a feature-rich, stable monitoring system that is easy for users to adopt and incorporate in their cloud native infrastructure,” said Richard Hartmann, Prometheus maintainer. “We’re thrilled to see widespread enterprise adoption and numerous commercial offerings in the ecosystem. We look forward to working with the community to make sure everyone can take advantage of all Prometheus has to offer.”

To learn more, read the blog post from the Prometheus maintainers.