What is Thanos used for?

Thanos is a set of components that adds high availability, a global query view and long-term object storage on top of existing Prometheus deployments; a CNCF Incubating project. It is a good fit for long-term retention of Prometheus metrics, querying metrics across many clusters and making Prometheus highly available.

Is Thanos open source?

Yes. Thanos is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at thanos-io/thanos and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Thanos is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Thanos?

Yes. Thanos can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What are some alternatives to Thanos?

Similar open-source tools in the Monitoring & Observability category include Cortex, Prometheus and VictoriaMetrics. SaaS products in the same category include Chronosphere, Amazon CloudWatch and Azure Monitor.

Is Thanos actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Thanos was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.42.4, published on 30 July 2026. The project has 14k stars on GitHub.

Thanos: open-source monitoring & observability

About Thanos

Thanos extends Prometheus for teams that outgrow a single server. It is a set of components that you compose into a highly available metrics system with essentially unlimited storage capacity, and it can be added on top of Prometheus deployments you already run.

Thanos uses the Prometheus 2.0 storage format to keep historical metrics cost-efficiently in object storage while keeping queries fast. It provides a global query view across many Prometheus servers, merges and deduplicates data from Prometheus HA pairs, downsamples older data to speed up long-range queries, and routes queries in a fault-tolerant way. A gRPC Store API gives unified access to all metric data and a hook for custom metric providers.

The project is written in Go, licensed under Apache-2.0 and part of the CNCF as an Incubating project. It can be deployed with a sidecar next to Prometheus in Kubernetes, or with the Receive component to scale out or accept data from other remote-write compatible sources. Following a UNIX-style philosophy, each subcommand does one job.

Key features

Global query view across Prometheus servers
Long-term metric storage in object storage
Deduplication of Prometheus HA pair data
Downsampling for faster historical queries
Sidecar and Receive deployment modes
gRPC Store API for unified data access
Federation across multiple clusters

Good fit for

→Long-term retention of Prometheus metrics
→Querying metrics across many clusters
→Making Prometheus highly available

Built with: Go
Tags: prometheus; monitoring; metrics; observability; object-storage; high-availability; cncf; kubernetes; long-term-storage

Thanos: questions and answers

What is Thanos used for?: Thanos is a set of components that adds high availability, a global query view and long-term object storage on top of existing Prometheus deployments; a CNCF Incubating project. It is a good fit for long-term retention of Prometheus metrics, querying metrics across many clusters and making Prometheus highly available.
Is Thanos open source?: Yes. Thanos is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at thanos-io/thanos and is written mainly in Go.
Is Thanos free?: Yes. Thanos is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Thanos?: Yes. Thanos can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What are some alternatives to Thanos?: Similar open-source tools in the Monitoring & Observability category include Cortex, Prometheus and VictoriaMetrics. SaaS products in the same category include Chronosphere, Amazon CloudWatch and Azure Monitor.
Is Thanos actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Thanos was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.42.4, published on 30 July 2026. The project has 14k stars on GitHub.