Prometheus has become the gold standard for monitoring cloud-native applications. But running Prometheus at scale comes with significant operational overhead. Let’s explore why a managed Prometheus solution might be the right choice for your team.

The Self-Hosting Challenge

Running your own Prometheus infrastructure seems straightforward at first, but quickly becomes complex as your needs grow.

Common Pain Points

Storage Management

  • Prometheus stores data locally by default
  • Long-term retention requires external storage solutions
  • Managing retention policies and data lifecycle becomes complex

High Availability

  • Setting up HA requires multiple Prometheus instances
  • Data consistency across replicas needs careful configuration
  • Alertmanager clustering adds another layer of complexity

Scalability Issues

  • Single Prometheus instance has limits (~10M active series)
  • Federation helps but adds operational burden
  • Sharding requires manual configuration and maintenance

Operational Overhead

  • Updates and security patches need coordination
  • Backup and disaster recovery procedures
  • Monitoring the monitoring system (yes, really)

Benefits of Managed Prometheus

1. Zero Infrastructure Management

With a managed solution like Bleemeo’s Prometheus in the Cloud:

# Simply point your applications to our endpoint
global:
  external_labels:
    cluster: 'production'

remote_write:
  - url: https://prometheus.bleemeo.com/api/v1/write
    basic_auth:
      username: 'your-username'
      password: 'your-password'

No servers to provision, no storage to manage, no HA to configure.

2. Automatic Scaling

Your metrics volume grows with your business. Managed Prometheus scales automatically:

  • Handle millions of time series without configuration
  • No sharding or federation complexity
  • Pay only for what you use

3. Built-in High Availability

  • Multiple redundant instances across availability zones
  • Automatic failover with no data loss
  • SLA-backed uptime guarantees

4. Long-Term Storage Included

  • Retain metrics for months or years
  • Query historical data without performance impact
  • Compliant with regulatory requirements

5. Advanced Features Out of the Box

Managed solutions often include extras:

  • Alerting: Sophisticated alert routing and notification channels
  • Dashboards: Pre-built visualizations for common use cases
  • Integrations: Native connections to other observability tools

Cost Comparison

Let’s break down the real cost of self-hosting vs managed:

Self-Hosted Prometheus

  • Infrastructure: $500-2000/month (depending on scale)
  • Engineer time: 20-40 hours/month for maintenance
  • Opportunity cost: Engineering time not spent on product features

Total: $5,000-10,000/month (including loaded engineer costs)

Managed Prometheus

  • Service fee: $500-3000/month (based on metrics volume)
  • Engineer time: 2-4 hours/month for configuration
  • Opportunity cost: Minimal

Total: $1,000-4,000/month

The managed solution typically costs 50-60% less when you factor in engineering time.

When Self-Hosting Makes Sense

Managed isn’t always the answer. Consider self-hosting if:

  • You have strict data residency requirements
  • Your team has deep Prometheus expertise with spare capacity
  • You’re already running infrastructure for other services
  • You have very specific customization needs

Migration Path

Moving from self-hosted to managed Prometheus is straightforward:

  1. Set up remote write: Configure your existing Prometheus to write to the managed service
  2. Validate: Run both systems in parallel for a week
  3. Switch queries: Update Grafana and other tools to use the managed endpoint
  4. Decommission: Shut down your self-hosted infrastructure

Most teams complete migration in under a week.

Real-World Success Stories

E-commerce Company (5000 services)

Before: Managing 20 Prometheus instances, 2 full-time engineers After: Single managed instance, minimal maintenance Savings: $150K/year in infrastructure and personnel

SaaS Startup (500 services)

Before: Single Prometheus instance hitting limits, frequent outages After: Scaled to 10M metrics seamlessly Result: No monitoring outages in 18 months

Getting Started with Bleemeo Prometheus

Ready to try managed Prometheus? Here’s how:

  1. Sign up for a free trial
  2. Configure remote write in your existing Prometheus
  3. Create dashboards using our pre-built templates
  4. Set up alerts with our intelligent alert manager

Conclusion

While Prometheus is an excellent open-source monitoring solution, managing it at scale requires significant investment. Managed Prometheus services like Bleemeo provide all the power of Prometheus without the operational burden, letting your team focus on what matters: building great products.

The question isn’t whether to use Prometheus—it’s how to use it most effectively. For most teams, that means going with a managed solution.

Start your free trial today and see the difference managed Prometheus can make.