Thanos

Spec sheet

Purpose

Thanos is an open-source set of components for building highly available Prometheus setups with long-term storage.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Deployment

Thanos runs in cloud-native and traditional environments, including Kubernetes and bare metal.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Integrations

The integrations documentation describes StoreAPI connections, including Geras for OpenTSDB and a proxy for Prometheus remote read.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Security

Thanos uses TLS by default for object storage communication, but its security policy says local metrics are not encrypted by Thanos and its HTTP APIs lack authorization or TLS support.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Dependencies

The documented dependency is one or more Prometheus v2.2.1+ installations with persistent disk; object storage is optional.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Downsampling

Thanos can downsample historical data to speed queries over large time ranges and configure retention policies.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Global queries

Thanos lets users query metrics across multiple Prometheus servers and clusters.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

License and origin

Thanos is licensed under Apache License 2.0 and was founded by Improbable.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Production guidance

The documentation does not recommend running Thanos on a single node in production because it is designed as a distributed system.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Prometheus compatibility

Thanos is compatible with tools such as Grafana that support the Prometheus Query API.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Retention

Thanos can use object storage to retain metrics for unlimited time.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Storage providers

The homepage lists GCP, S3, Azure, Swift, and Tencent COS as supported object storage options.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Support channels

The project points users to its Slack community and GitHub issue tracker for contact and support.Read 4 Oct 2026 · thanos.io

Plans and prices

Every Thanos plan and price →

Where Specifiction places it

• Kubernetes Monitoring#40 of 547.2
• Metrics Monitoring Tools#30 of 377.2