Inside Prometheus 3.0: Native Histograms, UTF-8, and the Future of Metrics | Big Tent S3E2

Grafana

Dec 19, 2025

From a SoundCloud side project to a global standard, Prometheus has come a long way — and 3.0 marks a major new chapter.

In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, hosts Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie sit down with:

Julius Volz – Co-creator of Prometheus; Founder of PromLabs and PromCon
Richi “RichiH” Hartmann – Prometheus maintainer; Senior Developer Programs Director, Grafana Labs

They dive into:

How Prometheus started as a Borgmon-inspired hobby project at SoundCloud
Why Prometheus stuck with a text-based exposition format (and why it still matters)
What’s new in Prometheus 3.0: performance gains, revamped UI, UTF-8 support, and more
Native histograms — and why Tom says it’s like going from standard definition to high-definition TV
OpenTelemetry interoperability, governance changes, and what might be coming in Prometheus 4.0

Timestamps:

0:00 – Welcome to Big Tent S3E2 & introducing Prometheus 3.0

0:38 – Meet the guests

1:07 – The Prometheus origin story: SoundCloud, Borgmon & broken monitoring

5:26 – Why Prometheus chose a text-based format (and why it still matters)

10:31 – Legacy monitoring vs cloud-native observability

14:35 – Why Prometheus 2.x lasted seven years

17:38 – Prometheus 3.0 performance gains

20:22 – Prometheus 3.0 UI updates, PromLens & Remote Write 2.0

22:03 – UTF-8 support & interoperability with OpenTelemetry

30:23 – Native histograms explained

34:00 – Native histograms & “HD observability” in production

40:22 – Breaking changes, upgrades & what to watch out for

42:56 – What’s next: governance changes, Prometheus 4.0 & the future

51:59 – Closing thoughts: Prometheus still has plenty of muscle

Links/resources:
Learn more about Grafana's Big Tent: https://bigtent.fm/
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Reach out in our community forums: https://gra.fan/communityyf

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