01
Emergency Incident Response
Prometheus down, alerting silent, or a server stuck in WAL replay while your on-call is blind. A senior engineer joins a live bridge within 15 minutes — monitoring being down during an incident is a P1 on its own.
Prometheus Support
24/7 Prometheus Support with a 15-Minute Emergency SLA
Last reviewed by Scott Sternloff
AceMQ supports Prometheus as production infrastructure — the OOM kill that turns into a two-hour WAL replay, the label somebody added last Tuesday that quadrupled your series count, targets silently dropped by a relabel rule, and Thanos queries that time out over anything longer than a week. Every ticket reaches a named senior engineer.
Support quotes answered within 1 hour, by a senior engineer.
- min emergency SLA
- 15
- across Americas, EMEA, APAC
- 24/7
- enterprise customers
- 160+
- countries served
- 26+
Planning a build, upgrade or migration instead? See AceMQ Prometheus consulting and services.
Customers
Partners
Incident Triage
Prometheus problems we fix every week
These are real symptoms from real Prometheus production environments — and the first thing our engineers check when one comes in.
| Symptom you're seeing | What we check first | Typical resolution |
|---|---|---|
| Prometheus OOM-killed, then unavailable for an hour or more on restart | Active series count and its recent growth, via the TSDB status endpoint and topk on scrape_samples_scraped. A new label carrying user IDs, request IDs, or full URL paths is the single most common cause, and the long restart is WAL replay working through everything that label created. | 1–2 hours |
| WAL replay taking hours after every restart | WAL segment count and size against head series. Replay is single-threaded per block and scales with head series, so it is a cardinality symptom rather than a disk symptom — the fix is fewer series, not faster storage. | 2–4 hours |
| Targets missing from the scrape pool with no error anywhere | The service discovery page before the targets page. A relabel_configs rule with a keep or drop action that no longer matches after a label rename silently removes targets, and nothing logs it because dropping is the intended behaviour. | Under 1 hour |
| Grafana dashboards slow, but only the ones with long time ranges | Series touched per query, then whether recording rules exist for the expensive expressions. A rate over a sum over an unaggregated metric re-evaluates every series on every refresh; a recording rule computes it once per evaluation interval. | 1–3 hours |
| Alerts fire but nobody gets paged | Alertmanager routing tree and active silences. Alerts routinely match a catch-all receiver higher in the tree than intended, get suppressed by an inhibit_rule written for a different scenario, or land under a silence somebody created during last month's maintenance and never expired. | Under 1 hour |
| Thanos or Mimir queries time out over anything beyond a few days | Whether compaction and downsampling have actually run for that time range. Querying raw blocks for a 30-day window fans out across every store gateway; the 5m and 1h downsampled series exist precisely to avoid that, and they are frequently missing because the compactor has been failing quietly. | Same day |
| Disk filling faster than the retention setting predicted | Bytes per sample against series churn. Retention bounds time, not size, so churn — pods that restart constantly, each producing a fresh set of series — inflates storage well past a sizing estimate based on steady-state series count. | 1–2 hours |
| remote_write backing up, with samples dropped at the queue | The remote write queue metrics — shards, pending samples, and failed sends — against the receiving endpoint's latency. Under-provisioned max_shards and a slow remote endpoint produce backpressure that Prometheus resolves by discarding samples. | 1–3 hours |
Resolution times reflect typical Prometheus engagements under an active AceMQ support contract. Every P1 closes with a written root-cause analysis.
What's Included
Everything in your Prometheus support contract
No add-on pricing for incidents. No per-ticket charges. One contract covers the whole surface.
- 02
Cardinality Control
Finding the metric and label that caused the growth, dropping it at the right layer with metric_relabel_configs, and putting guardrails in the exporter or instrumentation so the next well-meaning commit does not repeat it.
- 03
PromQL & Recording Rule Tuning
Rewriting queries that scan too many series, building the recording rules your dashboards should have had, and setting evaluation intervals that keep rule groups finishing well inside their window.
- 04
Alertmanager Design
Routing trees, grouping, inhibition, silences, and high-availability Alertmanager clusters. We prune alerts that never led to action and make sure the ones that survive reach the right team once.
- 05
Long-Term Storage Architecture
Thanos, Mimir, and Cortex — sidecar versus receive, compactor and downsampling health, object store layout, and query fan-out. We fix the compaction failures that make historical queries slow long before anyone notices.
- 06
Federation, Sharding & Scale
When to shard by scrape target rather than federate, how to keep hierarchical federation from becoming a single point of failure, and remote_write tuning for multi-cluster and multi-region estates.
Why AceMQ
What you get that you don't get elsewhere
Named Engineers, Zero Cold Start
The same senior engineers stay on your account. They know your scrape topology, your series budget, and your alert routing — so a P1 call opens with diagnosis instead of you describing the setup.
No Tier-1 Triage Layer
You reach a senior engineer directly by phone, email, or Slack. Nobody collects details to pass along, and there is no escalation approval standing between you and the person who can fix it.
Cardinality Is the Job, Not a Footnote
Most Prometheus incidents are one metric with one bad label. We find it fast, drop it at the correct layer, and fix the instrumentation — rather than doubling the memory limit and waiting for the same page in six weeks.
The Whole Stack, Including Grafana
Prometheus almost never runs alone. We support the Grafana on top, the Thanos or Mimir behind it, the exporters feeding it, and the Kubernetes underneath — so nothing gets handed back as somebody else's layer.
Genuine Follow-the-Sun Coverage
Engineers across 26+ countries and every time zone. Your 3am page is someone's mid-afternoon — no overnight skeleton crew, no waiting for a region to come online.
Proactive, Not Just Reactive
Quarterly reviews of series growth, rule evaluation timing, and storage headroom, so you resize ahead of the OOM rather than during it. Cardinality problems announce themselves weeks before they page anyone.
We support Prometheus wherever it's deployed
Cloud, Kubernetes, bare metal, hybrid, and air-gapped — including environments where you can't give us outbound network access.
- Kubernetes (Prometheus Operator, kube-prometheus-stack)
- OpenShift monitoring stack
- AWS (EC2, EKS, Amazon Managed Prometheus)
- Microsoft Azure (AKS, Azure Monitor managed)
- Google Cloud (GKE, Google Managed Prometheus)
- Thanos, Mimir & Cortex
- VictoriaMetrics
- VMware vSphere & Tanzu
- Bare metal & on-premise
- Air-gapped / no outbound access
- Alertmanager HA clusters
- Grafana Cloud remote_write
Escalation Path
Your first hour of a Prometheus outage
Every tier reaches a senior Prometheus engineer. There is no tier-1 triage layer to get through.
- 15 minfirst responseEmergencyProduction down, messages not flowing, queue manager failure
- 1 hourfirst responseCriticalSevere degradation, high error rates, approaching capacity
- 4 hoursfirst responseHighPerformance issues, configuration problems, non-critical failures
- Next Dayfirst responseStandardQuestions, guidance, best practices, non-urgent improvements
P1 escalation path
A replay of one P1, from the first page to the written root-cause analysis
T+Elapsed15:00
15-minute P1 response, 24/7.
A response time, not a resolution time.
- T+00:00Paged
P1 opened, on-call engineer paged
Phone, email or Slack reaches the on-call senior engineer directly, whether the incident is in RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL or Kubernetes. No web form, no tier-1 queue.
- T+15:00Live
Senior engineer on your bridge
A senior engineer who already knows your environment joins a live bridge, so nobody has to re-explain your topology.
- T+30:00If needed
Specialists across the stack join
When an incident crosses components, the engineers who know each one join. For RabbitMQ, the path runs to the core team.
- AfterEvery P1
Written root-cause analysis
Root cause, the fix applied and the prevention steps, delivered after every P1.
Pricing
What does AceMQ Prometheus support cost?
AceMQ Prometheus support contracts typically run $24,000–72,000 a year, depending on SLA level, scope (number of clusters or nodes, and environments) and deployment (self-managed, cloud-managed or Kubernetes).
| What moves the price | How it changes the contract |
|---|---|
| SLA level | Business-hours cover costs less than 24/7 cover with a 15-minute emergency response. |
| Scope | More clusters or nodes, and more environments, make a larger contract. |
| Deployment | Self-managed, cloud-managed and Kubernetes estates need different amounts of hands-on work. |
Covering several technologies under one contract, for example RabbitMQ, Kafka and Redis, earns an aggressive discount.
Support In Practice
Prometheus problems we've already solved
Prometheus support work from AceMQ. Each card links to the full write-up: the metrics estate, what AceMQ diagnosed or changed, and the result.
Stabilizing RabbitMQ on Kubernetes for Mission-Critical Airport Systems
Global Aviation Technology Provider
Troubleshooting cluster failover, partition handling, and quorum queue issues in a high-stakes aviation operational environment.
RabbitMQ
KubernetesQuorum Queues
Prometheus
GrafanaRabbitMQ Performance Remediation for Telecom-Scale IoT
Global Telecom Leader
Resolving weekly RabbitMQ crashes, optimizing for 300,000+ connected devices, and architecting horizontal scaling strategy.
RabbitMQKubernetesQuorum QueuesPrometheusGrafanaGrafana Outage and Datasource Timeout Remediation
Telecommunications Operator
Remediation of a Grafana deployment that became unusable during incidents, with dashboards timing out exactly when engineers needed them most.
GrafanaPrometheusKubernetes
PostgreSQLGrafana Alerting and Datasource Support
Energy Utility Operator
Ongoing support for Grafana unified alerting, notification routing, and datasource reliability across an operational monitoring estate.
GrafanaPrometheusAlertmanager
LinuxGrafana Dashboard Estate Assessment
Global Logistics Provider
Assessment of a sprawling Grafana dashboard estate to identify duplication, broken panels, and the small set of dashboards anyone actually uses.
GrafanaPrometheus
Amazon S3
TerraformPrometheus Cardinality Explosion and OOM Remediation
Digital Commerce Platform
Emergency remediation of Prometheus servers being OOM-killed repeatedly after a deployment introduced an unbounded label.
PrometheusKubernetesGrafanaAlertmanager
Support options
Four tiers of Prometheus support.
AceMQ offers Prometheus support in four tiers, each handing more of the day-to-day work to AceMQ: 24/7 support and incident management for servers your team runs, proactive monitoring that catches cardinality and alert-routing problems first, managed Prometheus on your own infrastructure, and fully managed Prometheus on AceMQ infrastructure. The 3.x LTS lines and 2.x are covered in all four.
- Tier 1
Prometheus 24/7 Support & Incident Management
You run it, we back you up
- 15-minute P1 response, 24/7, for Prometheus, Alertmanager and the storage layer
- Series growth traced to the metric and label that caused it
- Named senior engineers, no tier-1 triage layer
Best for: SRE teams that run Prometheus themselves and need senior cover when monitoring fails.
- Tier 2
Prometheus 24/7 Support with Proactive Monitoring
You run it, we watch it with you
- Scheduled reviews of active series, churn and scrape duration
- Recording rule and alert rule reviews against real firing history
- Thanos or Mimir compactor, retention and remote_write queue checks
Best for: Teams that want the cardinality spike found in a review, not by an OOM kill.
- Tier 3
Managed Prometheus on Your Infrastructure
We run it in your cloud or data centre
- Prometheus Operator, kube-prometheus-stack or OpenShift monitoring run to an agreed plan
- Alertmanager high availability, routing and silences kept as code
- Retention, remote_write and object storage capacity managed ahead of growth
Best for: Regulated estates that must keep metrics and scrape access inside their own boundary.
- Tier 4
Fully Managed Prometheus on AceMQ Infrastructure
We host it and run it, as a service
- Hosted and operated by AceMQ on AceMQ infrastructure
- Samples received by remote_write from your clusters and regions
- Alertmanager and long-term storage included, with rules kept in version control
Best for: Teams that want Prometheus metrics and alerting without owning the servers or object storage.
| Who does what | Tier 1 24/7 support | Tier 2 Proactive monitoring | Tier 3 Managed, your infrastructure | Tier 4 Fully managed by AceMQ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs Prometheus day to day? | Your team | Your team, with AceMQ reviews | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Where does it run? | Your infrastructure | Your infrastructure | Your cloud account or data centre | AceMQ infrastructure |
| 24/7 incident response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response | 15-minute P1 response |
| Health checks and CVE alerts | On request | Scheduled | Included | Included |
| Patching and upgrades | Your team, AceMQ advises | Planned with AceMQ | Done by AceMQ | Done by AceMQ |
| Monitoring and on-call | Your team | Your team | AceMQ | AceMQ |
| Data, keys and accounts | Yours | Yours | Yours | Your data, hosted by AceMQ |
Every Tier can start as an ad hoc engagement or an annual partnership, and you can move up or down a Tier as your team changes.
One partner for Prometheus
Everything else AceMQ does for Prometheus.
Support is one part of what AceMQ does for Prometheus. The same engineers deliver consulting, health checks, migrations and end-of-life cover, and support the systems that usually run next to it.
- ConsultingPrometheus consulting and services
- LifecycleEnd-of-life software support
- Enterprise supportOpen source support across your whole stack
- GuidePrometheus guide
Support for the rest of your stack
Messaging & Streaming
- RabbitMQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- Apache Kafka supportMessaging & Streaming
- IBM MQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- ActiveMQ supportMessaging & Streaming
- Azure Service Bus supportMessaging & Streaming
- Amazon SQS supportMessaging & Streaming
- Google Cloud Pub/Sub supportMessaging & Streaming
- Redpanda supportMessaging & Streaming
- Apache Pulsar supportMessaging & Streaming
- Message Queuing supportMessaging & Streaming
Databases & Caching
Search & Analytics
Lakehouse & Compute
Observability & Monitoring
Data Integration
Cloud & Containers
API Management
See support for all 51 technologiesShow fewer
Related services
What does AceMQ Prometheus support include?
Support covers 24/7 emergency incident response with a 15-minute SLA, written root cause analysis on every P1, cardinality control, PromQL and recording rule tuning, Alertmanager design, long-term storage architecture with Thanos or Mimir, and federation and sharding work. Every ticket goes to a named senior engineer assigned to your account, with no tier-1 triage layer and no per-incident charge.
Our Prometheus keeps getting OOM-killed. Is more memory the answer?
Occasionally, but usually not. Memory use tracks head series almost linearly, so a sudden OOM nearly always means active series grew — a new label carrying user IDs, request paths, or container IDs, or a service that started churning pods. Raising the limit buys weeks and makes the eventual WAL replay longer. We identify the specific metric and label, drop it with metric_relabel_configs, then fix the instrumentation so it does not come back.
How fast do you respond to a Prometheus outage?
P1 emergencies — Prometheus down, alerting silent, stuck in WAL replay — get a 15-minute first response with a senior engineer on a live bridge. P2 critical issues are 1 hour, P3 high-priority 4 hours, and P4 standard questions next business day. These are contractual response times, not best-effort targets. We treat a monitoring outage as P1 because it makes every concurrent incident harder to resolve.
Should we run Thanos, Mimir, or a managed service for long-term storage?
It depends on your query patterns, retention requirements, and how much operational surface you want to own. Thanos suits estates that already have per-cluster Prometheus servers and want a global query view. Mimir handles higher write volume with a more centralised model. Managed offerings remove the compactor and store gateway from your on-call rotation but cost more per series and constrain retention tiers. We have run all three and will give you the read that fits your estate rather than the one that fills the most billable hours.
Can you help us cut alert noise?
Yes, and this is one of the most valuable engagements we run. We start by measuring which alerts fired over the last quarter and which ones actually led to action, then delete the rules that never did. What remains gets proper for durations set against real metric noise, grouping so a cluster-wide failure sends one notification instead of two hundred, and inhibition so a node-down alert suppresses the fifteen pod alerts that follow it.
Do you support managed Prometheus on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud?
Yes. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Azure Monitor managed Prometheus, and Google Managed Prometheus all remove the server from your on-call rotation. They do not manage your cardinality, write your recording rules, design your alert routing, or stop a query from scanning millions of series — and they bill on series and samples ingested, which makes cardinality a direct cost line rather than only a memory one.
What is Prometheus, and what does the project itself offer for support?
Prometheus is an open source monitoring system and time series database, a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation under the Linux Foundation. It scrapes metrics from applications and exporters over HTTP, stores them as time series data, provides the Prometheus query language, PromQL, for querying them, and drives monitoring and alerting through Alertmanager. The project offers documentation, community channels and a list of commercial providers on its support and training page; it does not provide support itself, and its own maintenance window is short: minor releases are patched for about six weeks, and LTS releases for a year with high-severity fixes only. AceMQ provides the contract the project does not, for self-managed Prometheus and for the exporters, recording rules and dashboards around it.
Do you help teams build and operate Prometheus, not only fix it?
Yes. Much of the work is design: choosing what to scrape and at what interval, building recording rules so dashboards and alerts query cheap precomputed series, setting retention and deciding when to add Thanos, Mimir or a managed service for long-term storage, and instrumenting applications with the client libraries so the metrics exist in the first place. Alerting design follows: rules that page on symptoms rather than causes, routing and silences in Alertmanager, and runbooks linked from every alert. Teams also use us to review a Prometheus that grew organically over years and no longer matches the systems it monitors.
Can we work with AceMQ on Prometheus without a long contract?
Yes. AceMQ works on Prometheus in two ways: ad hoc engagements for a defined piece of work, such as a health check, an upgrade or an incident, or an annual partner engagement that covers 24/7 support, proactive reviews and named engineers. Many teams start ad hoc and move to an annual partnership once the first engagement is done.
How much does AceMQ Prometheus support or consulting cost?
Every AceMQ proposal is tailored to your requirements: your Prometheus environment, the SLA you need, the hours of cover and the scope of work. Most contracts run $24,000–72,000 a year, depending on the SLA, the scope and how Prometheus is deployed, with aggressive discounts when several technologies share one contract. Request a quote and AceMQ replies within 1 hour.
Let's talk
Monitoring That Fails During an Incident Makes Every Incident Longer
Reactive cover, proactive reviews, or AceMQ running Prometheus for you on your infrastructure or ours. A senior engineer scopes it with you, and quote requests are answered within 1 hour.
A senior Prometheus engineer, not a sales queueQuote requests answered within 1 hourAd hoc engagements or an annual partnership
Production incident right now?Email a Prometheus Architect
Get in Touch
Talk to a Prometheus Expert
Send us a message and we'll follow up within 1 hour — or book a free 30-min consultation directly.
305-204-2607info@acemq.com66 W. Flagler St. 9th Floor
Miami, FL 33130
Miami, FL 33130
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