Prometheus native histograms keep count, sum, and dynamic buckets in one sample. Sparse storage omits empty buckets, while exponential buckets cover a broad value range. They became stable in Prometheus 3.8.
The demo compares fixed and adaptive bucket views of the same latency samples. Scraping and remote write still require their respective settings; choose resolution with data cost in mind.
When to use
Use them for broad latency distributions and quantiles without manually resetting bucket boundaries.