Grafana vs Dynatrace: A Composable Open Stack Against a Single Agent-Led Platform
Prices and facts checked on vendor pages on Nov 8, 2026.
Grafana and Dynatrace both visualize and alert on telemetry, but the products are built on opposite ideas. Grafana is an open source dashboard layer with a set of storage backends and a hosted Grafana Cloud, so you assemble the pieces you need. Dynatrace is one agent-led platform where one data store and one AI engine cover hosts, applications, logs and security.
The Short Answer
Pick Grafana when you already run Prometheus-style metrics or Kubernetes, want the open source option, and are comfortable assembling instrumentation and alerts yourself. Pick Dynatrace when you want automatic discovery and root cause analysis from one agent, and prefer one commitment and one query language over a set of components. Many teams end up using both, because Grafana can query Dynatrace directly.
Grafana vs Dynatrace at a Glance
How Grafana Charges
These are list prices from grafana.com, checked on November 8, 2026. Grafana Cloud Free is $0 with usage limits and 14 days of retention. Pro is a $19 per month platform fee plus pay-as-you-go usage, with 13 months of metrics retention and 30 days for logs, traces and profiles. Enterprise starts at a $25,000 per year spend commitment and adds custom retention, premium support and deployment options including Federal Cloud and Bring Your Own Cloud.
Each product has its own meter. Metrics start at $6.50 per 1,000 active series, with 10,000 series included. Logs and traces start at $0.05 per GB processed and $0.40 per GB written, with retention beyond the 30-day minimum billed per GB for each extra 30-day increment, and queries free up to 100 times your written volume. Kubernetes Monitoring starts at $0.01 per host hour (about $7.20 per host per month), and Application Observability at $0.025 per host hour (about $18 per host). Frontend Observability is $0.75 per 1,000 sessions. All rates drop with volume.
How Dynatrace Charges
Dynatrace sells a platform subscription: one annual commitment that every product draws down at published rates, with unlimited seats. Full-Stack Monitoring is $58 per month per 8 GiB host and includes APM and Kubernetes Platform Monitoring. Foundation & Discovery is $7 per host per month and Infrastructure Monitoring is $29. Logs, traces and events are $0.20 per GiB ingested, with $0.0007 per GiB-day retention and $0.0035 per GiB scanned, and metrics are $0.15 per 100,000 datapoints.
One Log Bill, Priced Both Ways
Take 1,000 GB of logs a month, kept for 30 days, with no Adaptive Logs or other filtering on the Grafana side. This table uses starting list rates, treats 1 GB as 1 GiB, and ignores volume discounts. For Dynatrace it assumes all 1,000 GiB sit in storage for the full 30 days and that queries scan 200 GiB.
The gap shrinks or reverses with your own numbers. Grafana advertises that Adaptive Logs can cut ingest by up to 50% by recommending which log data to drop, and its volume tiers lower the rates as you grow. Dynatrace's per-GiB-day retention charge grows with longer retention, while Grafana's 30-day minimum on paid plans carries no extra retention charge. Run both calculators with your real volumes.
Data Model and Query Differences
Grafana's strength is that it composes. Loki, described in the docs as indexing only labels and storing chunks in object storage, handles logs and is queried with LogQL, which will feel familiar if you know PromQL. Grafana itself is the single pane over many backends, and Grafana OSS lists 150+ plugins to unify data sources. The trade-off is that label design matters, and you decide which backends to run or buy.
Dynatrace stores everything in Grail, which its docs describe as index-free and schema-on-read, with DQL as the single language and OpenPipeline for processing on the way in. OneAgent discovers processes on each host and activates instrumentation automatically, so the data arrives already tied to topology. Grafana's equivalents are Grafana Alloy, which Grafana recommends as the Collector for production OTLP, and Beyla for eBPF auto-instrumentation.
Using Both
The two are not strictly exclusive. Grafana's Dynatrace data source plugin queries Dynatrace metrics, problems, audit logs and logs (the Logs query type is in beta), and can query Grail. It works with Dynatrace SaaS and Managed. Because it is an Enterprise plugin, it comes with Grafana Cloud or Grafana Enterprise, which matters if you only run Grafana OSS today. For teams with Grafana dashboards everywhere, this is a gentler path than rebuilding views inside Dynatrace.
AI Assistants
Grafana Assistant is priced per active AI user ($20 on Pro, including 40M tokens) with additional tokens at $2 per million, and Investigations bills tokens only. The free tier includes 3 active AI users. Dynatrace includes AI Exploration at no extra charge and meters Agentic Operations at $0.10 per AI unit, with an autonomous multi-step investigation averaging 30 units. Dynatrace Intelligence also does causal root cause analysis over its Smartscape topology, and its agentic workflows are marked Preview.
When to Pick Grafana
- You want an open source core you can self-host, with Cloud as an option rather than a requirement.
- Your teams already speak PromQL and run Prometheus, Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry pipelines.
- You want a real free tier that never expires, with 14 days of retention.
- You need one dashboard layer across many data sources, possibly including Dynatrace.
When to Pick Dynatrace
- You want a single agent that discovers and instruments hosts and applications without per-service work.
- Root cause analysis tied to a dependency map matters more than dashboard flexibility.
- You need logs, traces or events kept for years under one query language.
- You prefer one annual commitment and unlimited seats to per-product meters and a per-user AI price.
Where Sazabi Fits
Sazabi is AI-native observability and security that can run next to either one. If you run Grafana Alloy, add an otelcol.exporter.otlphttp component beside your current exporters, following the Alloy source guide, and Sazabi's agent investigates in Slack and opens issues. Plans run $50, $200 and $1,000 per 30 days on the pricing page. See Sazabi vs Grafana, Sazabi vs Dynatrace, the Grafana Alloy integration, or Grafana alternatives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Grafana cheaper than Dynatrace?
Grafana has a free tier and a $19 per month Pro platform fee plus usage, while Dynatrace sells through an annual commitment with a 15-day trial. For 1,000 GB of logs a month at list rates, Grafana Cloud Pro comes to about $449 and Dynatrace Pay-per-Query to about $222, before volume discounts and with the units and assumptions shown on this page. Your own volumes and which Grafana optimizations you use will move both numbers.
Can I run Grafana and Dynatrace together?
Yes. Grafana offers a Dynatrace data source plugin that queries Dynatrace SaaS and Managed environments, including Grail, from Grafana dashboards. It is an Enterprise plugin, available with Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise.
Can I self-host either one?
Grafana OSS and Loki are open source and can be run yourself, with Loki storing log chunks in object storage. Dynatrace is SaaS with a documented self-managed option, Dynatrace Managed. Grafana Cloud Enterprise also lists Bring Your Own Cloud.
Which has the bigger free tier?
Grafana Cloud Free lists 10k active metric series, 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles, and 14 days of retention, with no end date. Dynatrace offers a 15-day free trial rather than an always-free tier.
Sources
- Grafana Cloud Free, Pro and Enterprise plans, platform fee, per-product rates for metrics, logs, traces, Kubernetes, Application Observability and Grafana Assistant, deployment options (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- How Grafana Cloud Logs bills processed, written, retained and queried gigabytes, the 50 GB written allotment and the 100x fair use query ratio (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Loki indexes labels rather than log contents, stores chunks in object storage and is queried with LogQL (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint, Grafana Alloy as the recommended Collector distribution, Beyla eBPF instrumentation (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Grafana OSS as the open source dashboarding project with 150+ plugins (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Grafana Enterprise plugin that queries Dynatrace SaaS and Managed, including Grail (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Dynatrace host, log, metric and trace rates, retention ranges, AI units and unlimited seats (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Grail data lakehouse that is index-free and schema-on-read (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Log management on Grail queried with DQL and processed in OpenPipeline (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- One OneAgent per host with automatic discovery and instrumentation (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- OTLP ingest for traces, metrics and logs, direct or via a Collector (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Dynatrace Intelligence causal analysis and agentic workflows (Preview) (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Dynatrace Managed documentation for a self-managed cluster (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi plan prices, included usage and overage rates (accessed Nov 8, 2026)
- Sazabi as an additional otelcol.exporter.otlphttp target in a Grafana Alloy pipeline (accessed Nov 8, 2026)