> The way the user runs it means that they don't store any metrics locally Ah, that's great! I was mistakenly assuming that Prometheus would still have to writ

> The way the user runs it means that they don't store any metrics locally Ah, that's great! I was mistakenly assuming that Prometheus would still have to write the data to disk; I didn't realize you could disable local storage. > The range of exporters is very extensive Sure, but that doesn't solve the problem that your heroku dyno, or lambda function, etc cannot expose metrics for Prometheus to pull, but it could easily push metrics somewhere. > it's designed as one component that someone running at large scale or a SaaS vendors needs. Your comparison isn't apples to apples. That's fair; I was thinking of Cortex as something to adopt off the shelf, instead of something to integrate with. However, as a SaaS provider you can always build more custom functionality alongside Cortex instead of making it a direct part of the open-source project.