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Tool profile · Observability & Monitoring

Grafana + Prometheus

Top pick

The open-source observability standard.

90
sovereignty

Prometheus stores metrics, Grafana visualizes them, and Loki and Tempo add logs and traces — together the de-facto open-source stack that replaces New Relic's dashboards, alerting, and metrics at hardware cost, fully self-hostable.

OPEN SOURCEAGPL-3.0 (Grafana) / Apache-2.0 (Prometheus)SELF-HOSTLOCAL-FIRST
LicenseAGPL-3.0 (Grafana) / Apache-2.0 (Prometheus)
PricingFree / self-host
Open sourceYes
Self-hostableYes
Local-first dataYes

What it does well

  • +Industry-standard with an enormous ecosystem of dashboards and integrations
  • +Metrics, logs, and traces through one Grafana UI
  • +Portable OpenTelemetry/Prometheus data, no proprietary query lock-in

Where it falls short

  • You assemble and operate several components yourself
  • Steeper initial setup than a hosted agent
  • APM/tracing needs Tempo and instrumentation work to match New Relic

Grafana + Prometheus as an alternative to

Where Grafana + Prometheus shows up in our comparisons, and how it ranked.

Grafana + Prometheus head-to-head

Straight comparisons against the tools people weigh it against.

The Macrostack brief

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