Dynatrace vs. Grafana Cloud
Compare Dynatrace vs. Grafana Cloud for Observability. We want you to choose the most suitable tool for your use case, even if it’s not us.
As cloud-native environments continue to grow in complexity, observability has become essential for ensuring the reliability, performance, and scalability of modern applications. From monitoring infrastructure health, enabling deep visibility into distributed systems, or getting real-time insights into reasoning paths, token usage of LLM Agentic applications. However, traditional vendors sliced visibility into separate products (APM, Log Management, Infrastructure Monitoring, LLM Observability) and priced them in ways that forced tradeoffs making it important for team to choosing the right observability platform is critical to operational success.
The right choice depends on your priorities: cost, control, scale, and flexibility. In the following sections, we’ll compare both platforms to help you determine which best fits your needs, even if the answer isn’t us.
Dynatrace vs. Grafana Cloud at a glance
Dynatrace vs. Grafana Cloud at a glance
Dynatrace vs. Grafana Cloud at a glance
Dynatrace overview
Dynatrace is a software-intelligence platform that provides observability, automation, and security for cloud environments. It offers application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, digital experience monitoring (DEM), log management, application security, and AIOps in a single system. Dynatrace uses a single agent, called OneAgent, to automatically instrument applications, services, and infrastructure. Its Smartscape technology maps dependencies across environments, while the Davis AI engine analyzes telemetry to detect anomalies, identify root causes, and trigger automated responses. The platform also includes Grail, a data lakehouse designed for storing and analyzing observability and security data with contextual insights. Organizations use Dynatrace to monitor complex IT environments, reduce time to resolution, and automate operational tasks across the software delivery lifecycle.
Grafana Cloud overview
Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform that brings together metrics, logs, and traces using open-source projects such as Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, and Mimir. It provides dashboards, alerting, and analytics in a single hosted service, removing the need for teams to deploy and manage their own observability stack. The platform supports infrastructure, application, and Kubernetes monitoring, with prebuilt dashboards and integrations for more than 100 external data sources. Additional capabilities include performance testing with Grafana k6, incident management with Grafana Incident and Grafana OnCall, and AI-powered features like anomaly detection and metric forecasting. Grafana Cloud is used by teams that want to standardize on open-source observability tools while offloading the operational overhead of running them at scale.
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