Dynatrace vs Grafana
Dynatrace and Grafana are both monitoring and observability software. Dynatrace is a commercial product from Dynatrace. Grafana is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 78k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Dynatrace when
- A large enterprise with complex hybrid environments wants automatic discovery and causal problem detection.
- Pick Grafana when
- You need shared dashboards and alerts across several data sources, self-hosted or on Grafana Cloud.
Side by side
Enterprise observability with automatic instrumentation through its OneAgent, dependency mapping and AI-driven root cause analysis.
A dashboard and alerting platform that visualises metrics, logs and traces from Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, SQL databases and many other sources.
Expensive, and its proprietary agent model is less open than OpenTelemetry-first tools.
AGPL licensed, and some features live only in Grafana Enterprise or Cloud.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service and self-hosted server
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Not published
Go, TypeScript and React
Closed source, sold by Dynatrace
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
1k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
78k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v13.3.0.
Other comparisons
More monitoring and observability tools
Every monitoring and observability product and project, ranked
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.