Inside Prometheus 3.0: UTF-8, Native Histograms, and OpenTelemetry Interoperability

Grafana's Big Tent

In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, hosts Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie sit down with Julius Volz, co-creator of Prometheus and founder of PromLabs, and Richi "RichiH" Hartmann, Prometheus maintainer and Senior Developer Programs Director at Grafana Labs, to unpack Prometheus 3.0. They trace Prometheus back to its beginnings at SoundCloud, where Julius and his colleagues were trying to recreate the magic of Google’s Borgmon. The group dives into why Prometheus stuck with a text-based exposition format, what’s new in 3.0 — including performance gains, revamped UI, UTF-8 support, and native histograms — and how it fits alongside OpenTelemetry. Along the way, they explore governance changes, future directions, and why emojis are now valid in metric names.