# Grafana Mimir

> AGPL-3.0 scalable long-term Prometheus storage

**Category:** Observability  
**Pricing:** open-source  
**URL:** https://grafana.com/oss/mimir/  
**GitHub:** https://github.com/grafana/mimir  
**Added:** 2026-10-18

---

## The Hook

Grafana Mimir is horizontally scalable, highly available long-term storage for Prometheus metrics, with a global query view across many Prometheus instances.

## What's Good

AGPL-3.0 (grafana/mimir), release mimir-3.2.2 (2026-10-07). Run it as one binary in monolithic mode or as microservices; Grafana's internal testing reports up to 1 billion active series. It ships best-practice dashboards, alerts and runbooks, supports multi-tenancy, stores blocks in object storage and has a parallelised query engine. Fully PromQL compatible. ★~5.3k.

## The Catch

A scaled Mimir is many components to operate, and object storage plus compactor tuning are real work. If you are below tens of millions of series, a single VictoriaMetrics or Prometheus with remote storage is simpler. AGPL-3.0 if you offer a modified version as a service.

## Verdict

The Prometheus backend for when one Prometheus is not enough.