Chronosphere

Chronosphere is the cloud-native observability platform built by the creators of M3, the open-source metrics engine that Uber developed to handle trillions of data points. While observability costs are spiraling out of control — often growing faster than the infrastructure they monitor — Chronosphere provides the control mechanisms that enterprises need to manage observability data volumes without sacrificing visibility. The platform's core innovation is its Control Plane, which gives teams the ability to aggregate, downsample, and route metrics and traces before they incur storage costs.

Founded by ex-Uber engineers who experienced the observability scaling problem firsthand, Chronosphere is designed for organizations running thousands of microservices that generate overwhelming telemetry data. The platform natively supports Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, meaning teams can adopt it without changing their instrumentation, while gaining the enterprise-grade reliability, multi-tenancy, and cost governance that open-source monitoring tools lack.

• Metrics Platform
  Prometheus-compatible metrics storage and querying with a distributed architecture that scales to trillions of data points with consistent query performance.
• Distributed Tracing
  OpenTelemetry-native trace collection, storage, and analysis with service maps, latency breakdowns, and trace-to-metrics correlation.
• Control Plane
  Data management layer that lets teams aggregate, downsample, drop, and route telemetry data based on rules — controlling costs without losing critical signals.
• Alerting & Dashboards
  PromQL-based alerting with multi-signal correlation, plus Grafana-compatible dashboards with team-based organization and access controls.
• Cost Attribution
  Per-team and per-service cost breakdowns showing exactly which services and metrics drive observability spend, enabling informed optimization decisions.

Observability has become one of the fastest-growing line items in engineering budgets, with many organizations spending more on monitoring their infrastructure than on the infrastructure itself. The root cause is microservice architectures that generate exponentially more telemetry data as they scale. Chronosphere is the first platform to treat observability cost management as a first-class feature rather than an afterthought.

For platform engineering teams, Chronosphere provides the tools to offer self-service observability to application teams while maintaining cost governance and performance guarantees. The Control Plane ensures that high-cardinality metrics from one team don't degrade query performance for everyone else — a problem that plagues shared Prometheus and Grafana installations at scale.