Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus adds native histogram support
Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now supports native histograms, allowing for higher-resolution metric distributions with reduced cardinality and more precise percentile calculations. This benefits DevOps and SRE teams by eliminating the need for manual bucket configuration and lowering the active series count. The feature is available in all AWS Regions and offers a more cost-effective way to monitor distributions.
- →Support for Prometheus native histograms
- →Improved percentile calculations and reduced cardinality
- →Incremental adoption and flexible migration
- →Cost-effective metering for native histograms
- →Availability and documentation
Features (1) ›
- Support for Prometheus native histograms
Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now supports the ingestion, storage, and querying of Prometheus native histograms, enabling higher-resolution metric distributions. This allows for greater precision and lower cardinality compared to classic histograms.
Enhancements (3) ›
- Improved percentile calculations and reduced cardinality
Native histograms use exponential bucketing to automatically adapt resolution, storing distributions in a single time series instead of one per bucket boundary. This significantly reduces the active series count and enables more precise percentile calculations using functions like histogram_quantile().
- Incremental adoption and flexible migration
Customers can adopt native histograms incrementally alongside existing classic histograms, allowing for a gradual migration of workloads without disruption to current monitoring setups.
- Cost-effective metering for native histograms
Metering and charging for native histograms are based solely on populated buckets containing actual observations, meaning users do not pay for empty buckets in sparse distributions.
Notes (1) ›
- Availability and documentation
This capability is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is offered. Further details can be found in the Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus documentation and pricing pages.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/06/amazon-managed-service-prometheus-native-histograms/