Cortex provides horizontally scalable, multi-tenant Prometheus as a service, enabling organizations to offer monitoring capabilities to multiple teams or customers with isolation, custom limits, and high availability. This guide covers deploying Cortex in production with microservices architecture, per-tenant configuration, and performance optimization.

Cortex Multi-Tenant Monitoring

Executive Summary

Cortex is a CNCF project that provides horizontally scalable, highly available Prometheus with multi-tenancy support. It’s ideal for organizations building monitoring platforms serving multiple teams, environments, or customers. This guide demonstrates production deployment with per-tenant limits, distributed architecture, and query optimization.

Cortex Architecture

Cortex uses a microservices architecture:

  • Distributor: Validates and distributes samples
  • Ingester: Writes metrics to long-term storage
  • Querier: Handles metric queries
  • Query Frontend: Query caching and splitting
  • Compactor: Compacts blocks
  • Store Gateway: Serves historical data
  • Ruler: Evaluates rules per tenant

Multi-Tenancy Configuration

limits_config:
  # Global defaults
  ingestion_rate: 100000
  ingestion_burst_size: 200000
  max_global_series_per_user: 500000
  
  # Per-tenant overrides
  per_tenant_override_config: /etc/cortex/overrides.yaml

# overrides.yaml
overrides:
  tenant-premium:
    ingestion_rate: 500000
    max_global_series_per_user: 5000000
  tenant-standard:
    ingestion_rate: 100000
    max_global_series_per_user: 1000000

Best Practices

  1. Implement proper tenant isolation
  2. Configure appropriate rate limits per tenant
  3. Use consistent hashing for distribution
  4. Enable query result caching
  5. Monitor Cortex metrics for health
  6. Implement tenant quota management
  7. Use object storage for scalability
  8. Configure proper replication factors
  9. Regular capacity planning
  10. Implement alerting on limit violations

Conclusion

Cortex enables organizations to provide Prometheus as a service with true multi-tenancy, allowing scalable monitoring infrastructure that serves multiple teams or customers with isolation and custom configurations.