Grafana Labs has launched Mimir 3.0 to strengthen open source, Prometheus-compatible observability at enterprise scale, aiming to eliminate reliance on proprietary monitoring stacks.
Grafana Labs has introduced Grafana Mimir 3.0 at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025, marking a major architectural evolution of its open source, horizontally scalable metrics backend. The release positions Mimir 3.0 as a high-reliability, high-performance, and cost-efficient backbone for Prometheus-compatible monitoring in large enterprise environments.
The launch reinforces Grafana Labs’ long-standing commitment to open source, open standards, and open ecosystems, directly advocating against vendor lock-in. Alongside Mimir 3.0, the company introduced Grafana Tempo 2.9 with AI-assisted tracing, continued Kubernetes Monitoring enhancements including fleet management and Helm Chart v2, and deeper integrations with Prometheus and OpenTelemetry to simplify observability operations.
“From open source and open standards to open ecosystems and open minds – building in the open is core to our philosophy at Grafana Labs,” said Myrle Krantz, Senior Director of Engineering, Grafana Labs. “That’s why we’re continuing to invest in open source, like adding AI-assisted tracing in Tempo and making it easier to get the most out of OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. We’re continuously improving Kubernetes Monitoring. And with the new Mimir 3.0 release, we’re helping teams scale even more reliably, expanding what’s possible for open observability in 2026 and beyond.”
Mimir 3.0 introduces a decoupled architecture with an asynchronous Kafka ingest layer, ensuring ingestion spikes do not impact query performance. The new Mimir Query Engine (MQE) streams results to reduce memory usage by up to 92%, while early tests show ~15% lower resource consumption with higher throughput.
Mimir 3.0 is available via Grafana Cloud and self-managed open-source deployments.
