Prometheus · Rate Limits

Prometheus Rate Limits

Prometheus is self-hosted; there is no upstream rate-limit policy. Throughput is bounded by the operator's deployment — scrape interval, retention, query concurrency, remote-write throughput — all tunable via the Prometheus configuration file and command-line flags.

2 Limits
ObservabilityMonitoringOpen SourceRate Limiting

Limits

Operator-tuned query concurrency instance
concurrent_requests
configured via --query.max-concurrency (default 20)
Operator-tuned scrape interval instance
varies
configured via global.scrape_interval

Policies

Self-Hosted
All throughput and concurrency limits are owned by the operator running the binary; there is no upstream throttler, no API key, and no per-tenant quota.
Remote-Write Backpressure
When using remote_write, Prometheus enforces queue-based backpressure governed by the `queue_config` block (capacity, max_samples_per_send, max_shards) — not a vendor-side rate limit.

Sources