Features and benefits
TSDB for Prometheus is a high-performance, low-cost, stable and reliable online time series database service. It serves as a native third-party remote storage backend for Prometheus, extending Prometheus beyond local storage limits — enabling long-term data persistence, large-scale historical data retention, and horizontal scaling.
With TSDB for Prometheus, you can:
Persist metrics data across Prometheus restarts.
Retain historical metrics beyond local disk capacity.
Scale storage horizontally to handle large-volume monitoring workloads.
Query both recent and historical metrics through a single, consistent Prometheus query path.
Why Prometheus needs remote storage
Prometheus's local storage design keeps operations simple and meets most small-to-medium monitoring needs. However, local storage has three hard limits:
No persistence: metrics are lost if the Prometheus instance restarts.
Limited retention: local disk capacity caps how far back you can query.
No horizontal scaling: local storage cannot scale out to handle large-volume workloads.
Prometheus addresses these limits by defining a standard remote storage interface. TSDB for Prometheus implements this interface as a server-side service. For more information on Prometheus, see the Prometheus documentation.
Benefits
Built-in integration
Most third-party Prometheus remote storage solutions require deploying and managing a separate remote storage adapter alongside your Prometheus instance. A standalone adapter introduces additional failure points and adds operational overhead.
TSDB for Prometheus embeds the remote storage adapter on the server side. To connect Prometheus to TSDB, update the remote read and write endpoints in your prometheus.yaml configuration file — no additional components to deploy or maintain. This greatly reduces the single point of failure risk inherent in standalone adapters and reduces O&M costs.
Full read and write support
Some third-party remote storage backends — including OpenTSDB, Graphite, and Elasticsearch — support only write mode through the Prometheus community adapter. You can store metrics remotely but cannot query them back through Prometheus's standard query path.
TSDB for Prometheus supports both remote read and remote write. Queries issued against your Prometheus instance transparently retrieve data from TSDB, giving you a consistent query experience across both recent and historical metrics.
For the full list of third-party remote storage systems and their read/write support status, see Remote endpoints and storage.