Elastic adds Prometheus ingestion & PromQL in Kibana

Elastic has added native Prometheus ingestion and PromQL support in Kibana to Elastic Observability. Both features are available in technical preview.

The update lets users ingest Prometheus metrics directly through Remote Write and run PromQL queries in Kibana without changing existing queries. Teams can analyse Prometheus metrics alongside logs and traces in a single environment.

Prometheus is widely used by site reliability engineers managing Kubernetes-based systems, but telemetry volumes and metric cardinality can rise sharply as deployments grow. As a result, teams can end up working across multiple observability tools, maintaining duplicate pipelines and rewriting queries to move between systems.

Elastic is positioning the new support as a way to reduce that fragmentation. By ingesting native Prometheus data while preserving its existing structure, users can avoid the adapters and format-translation layers often used to move metrics into other platforms.

Native PromQL support in Kibana is also intended to lower the barrier for organisations that already rely on Prometheus. Existing queries, dashboards and alerts can be used without modification, while logs and traces remain available in the same system for investigation work.

The changes are aimed at teams handling incident response across cloud-native and AI-related environments. In those settings, engineers often need to correlate different forms of telemetry quickly to identify the source of operational problems.

Bahaaldine Azarmi, General Manager of Observability at Elastic, said disconnected monitoring data remains a practical obstacle for operations teams.

"Modern incident response is slowed down by tool sprawl and disconnected data, and SREs shouldn't have to pivot between tools or rewrite queries just to understand what's happening in production," said Bahaaldine Azarmi, General Manager, Observability at Elastic.

Azarmi said Elastic wants the new support to shorten investigations once alerts appear.

"With native Prometheus ingestion and PromQL in Kibana, teams get a single platform that dramatically reduces time to root cause," he said.

Market reach

Elastic said its software is used by 45% of the ASX top 20 companies, underscoring its presence among large Australian businesses. Globally, the company said its products are used by thousands of organisations, including more than half of the Fortune 500.

The latest addition sits within Elastic Observability, one of the company's core product lines alongside search and security software. Observability tools have become a key area of competition as companies seek to monitor distributed applications, cloud infrastructure and AI systems generating growing volumes of machine data.

Technical preview

Both native Prometheus ingestion and PromQL support in Kibana are being released as technical preview features. That typically means they are available for testing and evaluation, but are not yet final production releases.

For users already running Prometheus, the key question is whether they can adopt Elastic's tooling without rebuilding established operational workflows. Query-language compatibility and direct metric ingestion are often central considerations when teams evaluate adding or replacing observability systems.

Elastic said its approach keeps Prometheus workflows intact while bringing metrics together with other telemetry sources. That can create a single source of truth for observability data, particularly for teams investigating incidents across metrics, logs and traces without switching between separate products.

The release also reflects a broader push by observability vendors to consolidate data types and reduce friction for engineering teams. Rather than asking customers to migrate fully from one toolset to another, vendors are increasingly adding support for open-source standards and established query languages already used in production.

In this case, Elastic's message centres on compatibility with Prometheus rather than replacement. That may resonate with engineering teams that have already built operational processes around PromQL and want to preserve them while extending analysis into other forms of telemetry.

Elastic said SREs can stream Prometheus metrics into Elasticsearch while maintaining their original structure and semantics.