Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available monitoring and alerting system based on Prometheus, designed to efficiently handle large volumes of time series data while providing long-term storage and multitenancy. It leverages technologies such as AWS DynamoDB, Google Cloud Bigtable, and Apache Cassandra for durability and reliability, while managing data ingestion and queries effectively. Additionally, Grafana Cloud offers a fully managed metrics platform integrating Grafana and Prometheus, simplifying observability for users.