Prometheus and OpenTelemetry Just Couldn’t Get Along

Prometheus was long the de facto standard for metrics in observability. Then came VictoriaMetrics, originally a fork of Prometheus, and Grafana’s Mimir, a newer metrics backend designed for scalability. As OpenTelemetry matured, it introduced a unified standard for metrics, logs and traces — appearing to compete with Prometheus in the metrics space.

But this competition was only surface-level. Prometheus now integrates well with OpenTelemetry and remains a core part of the ecosystem. That said, Prometheus 2.0 introduced challenges when…