Prometheus, an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, plays a crucial role in cloud-native environments, particularly within Kubernetes, by collecting and storing metrics in a time-series database. It utilizes a variety of community and vendor-built exporters to gather metrics from diverse sources such as hardware, databases, messaging systems, and storage solutions. Despite its robust capabilities, Prometheus faces limitations in security, access control, scalability, and global visibility. Security is not default, requiring workarounds for TLS and authentication; access is open to all users by default, and scalability is restricted to vertical rather than horizontal scaling. To overcome these constraints, solutions like Thanos and Dynatrace's k8s operator enhance Prometheus by addressing security and scalability issues and integrating metrics with logs and traces for better context. Dynatrace, in particular, offers a method to automatically collect metrics, reduce server workload, and secure data without disrupting existing Kubernetes operations.