# Do coding agents recommend Prometheus?

> Coding agents raised Prometheus in 139 of 360 judged observability sessions and chose it in none of them. Measured with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.

Source: https://armature.tech/library/do-coding-agents-recommend-prometheus
Published: 2026-09-03
Publisher: Armature, Inc. (https://armature.tech)

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> Coding agents raised Prometheus in 139 of 360 judged observability sessions and chose it in none of them.

This page reports what happened when Claude Code, Codex and Cursor had to solve a problem in observability inside a realistic codebase. Not what a chat assistant says about Prometheus. What an agent actually installed.

## The numbers

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Category | Observability |
| Sessions in the category | 360 |
| Sessions where Prometheus was chosen | 0 |
| Install share | 0% |
| Raised as a candidate, not chosen | 139 |
| Chosen when considered | 0% |
| Site | prometheus.io |

## Which agents raised Prometheus

Every agent considered it and none adopted it. Cursor raised it most often, in 55% of its observability sessions.

| Agent | Sessions | Raised Prometheus | Chose it |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Claude Code | 120 | 50 (42%) | 0 |
| Codex | 120 | 23 (19%) | 0 |
| Cursor | 120 | 66 (55%) | 0 |

## Which buyers it came up for

It surfaced most for requests written as enterprise team, in 89% of those sessions. Knowing which buyer already has the product in mind tells you which pages to fix first.

| Who is asking | Sessions | Raised it |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vibe coder | 12 | 1 (8%) |
| Junior developer | 12 | 3 (25%) |
| Senior engineer | 300 | 103 (34%) |
| Enterprise team | 36 | 32 (89%) |

## What Prometheus was up against

The full ranking in observability, from the same sessions:

| # | Product | Runs won | Share |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | Sentry | 133 | 37% |
| 2 | Grafana | 52 | 14% |
| 3 | Amazon CloudWatch | 30 | 8% |
| 4 | Built in-house (no product adopted) | 22 | 6% |
| 5 | Checkly | 17 | 5% |
| 6 | Datadog | 16 | 4% |
| 7 | Better Stack | 15 | 4% |
| 8 | New Relic | 15 | 4% |

## What this means

Raised 139 times and chosen none is a specific, diagnosable result, and a better starting position than being unknown. The agent has the product in mind. It reached the shortlist 139 times. Something then lost every one of those sessions.

In our data the causes, in the order they occur:

- The quickstart does not run when pasted, so the agent abandoned it mid-integration.
- The documentation describes an interface that changed, so the generated code failed.
- The product name and the package name differ, so the install step went wrong.
- The fit was genuinely wrong for the repository, which is fine and worth knowing.

All but the last are fixable in days, and the reason is written down in the session transcript.

## Where these numbers come from

The 360 sessions in observability are part of a published set of 5,292, run with real coding agents inside realistic codebases and judged blind. The full method is on one page: [how we measured this](/library/how-we-measured-this).

Every observability run can be replayed on [the board](/leaderboards/observability).

If you work on Prometheus: the judge recorded a reason for every session where it was raised and passed over. Those reasons are in the transcripts.

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## Common questions

### Do coding agents recommend Prometheus?

They raise it but do not choose it. Across 139 sessions where Prometheus came up as a candidate, agents chose something else every time.

### Does Claude Code recommend Prometheus?

In 0 of the 120 sessions in observability run with Claude Code, which is 0%.

### Do different coding agents treat Prometheus differently?

Not much. The three agents chose it at similar rates, between 0% and 0% of their runs.

### How was this measured?

Real coding agents at pinned versions were run in sandboxes inside 51 realistic codebases and asked to solve real tasks. A simulated project owner approved or questioned each recommendation before any code was written, and a judge from a model family that builds none of the agents read every session blind.

## Read next

- [How to get picked for observability by coding agents](https://armature.tech/library/observability-coding-agents-playbook) (Markdown: https://armature.tech/library/observability-coding-agents-playbook.md)
- [Do coding agents recommend Sentry?](https://armature.tech/library/do-coding-agents-recommend-sentry) (Markdown: https://armature.tech/library/do-coding-agents-recommend-sentry.md)
- [Do coding agents recommend Grafana?](https://armature.tech/library/do-coding-agents-recommend-grafana) (Markdown: https://armature.tech/library/do-coding-agents-recommend-grafana.md)
- [Do Claude Code, Codex and Cursor pick the same tools?](https://armature.tech/library/do-claude-code-and-codex-agree) (Markdown: https://armature.tech/library/do-claude-code-and-codex-agree.md)

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