Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus Now Supports Native Histograms

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now supports ingestion, storage, and querying of Prometheus native histograms, allowing customers to capture high-resolution metric distributions with greater precision and lower cardinality than classic histograms. DevOps engineers, site reliability engineers, and platform teams monitoring latency, request durations, and other distributions can now obtain more accurate percentile calculations without pre-defining bucket boundaries or managing high-cardinality time series. Native histograms use exponential bucketing to automatically adapt resolution to data, storing an entire distribution in a single time series rather than requiring one series per bucket boundary. This reduces the active series count, as a classic histogram with 20 buckets that previously required 22 time series now requires only one, while delivering more precise tail-latency insights from functions like histogram_quantile(). Native histograms can be adopted incrementally alongside existing classic histograms, allowing workloads to be migrated at their own pace without disrupting current monitoring. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus meters and charges native histograms based only on populated buckets that contain actual observations, so users do not pay for empty buckets in sparse distributions. This capability is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is offered.