Prometheus native histograms in Grafana Cloud: More precise, easier to use, and better compatibility

Prometheus native histograms, now in public preview on Grafana Cloud, offer superior precision and ease of use compared to classic histograms, facilitating the monitoring and visualization of key metrics like response times. These native histograms, which are also available in Grafana Mimir OSS and Grafana Enterprise Metrics, provide higher resolution and compatibility with other formats such as OpenTelemetry exponential histograms and Datadog distributions. Introduced in 2022, they are designed to eventually replace classic histograms, offering two modes: one with custom buckets for compatibility and another with standard exponential buckets. Native histograms simplify instrumentation and querying processes while offering enhanced compatibility and value for cost, as they are billed differently, counting only active buckets. The development team is working on a new mode that allows native histograms to store classic histograms directly, providing further compatibility and resolving consistency issues, with the goal of fully replacing classic histograms in the future.

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