Thanos

Databricks · May 5, 2026

10 trillion samples a day: Scaling beyond traditional monitoring infra at Databricks

Databricks’ monitoring infrastructure now tracks 5 billion active timeseries in real time and ingests more than 10 trillion samples daily, exposing scalability, reliability, cost, and operability limits in its older stack. The replacement, Pantheon, is a fork of CNCF Thanos deployed across more than 160 instances in about 70 regions and three cloud providers; tiered storage, differentiated memory retention, isolated replicated Receive groups, multitenancy, and a custom control plane support automated scaling and recovery. Pantheon’s largest instance holds about 300 million in-memory timeseries and handles nearly 1,000 PromQL queries per second, while migration reduced annual cloud costs by millions and monitoring downtime by roughly five times. For high-cardinality troubleshooting, Hydra preserves raw metrics in Delta tables, exposes them through Grafana and SQL, and unifies metric semantics across aggregated and raw paths, with freshness improvements planned.