tool vs tool
Prometheus vs Grafana Cloud / LGTM
Self-run versus managed, for the same cloud-native world. Prometheus is the free engine you operate yourself; Grafana Cloud is the hosted home for Prometheus-compatible metrics (plus logs and traces) where someone else carries scaling, HA and retention.
| Prometheus open source / community (CNCF) | Grafana Cloud / LGTM Grafana Labs | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Infra & metrics | Observability / APM |
| License | Open source | Open core |
| Deployment | Self-hosted | SaaS or self-hosted |
| Monitors | MetricsServersK8sCloudNetwork | ServersMetricsLogsTracesSyntheticsK8sCloudProfiling |
| Pricing | Free / OSS Free tier ✓ | Free / OSSUsage creditsPer user Free tier ✓ |
| Cost | Free Free software; cost is engineering time + the surrounding stack. | Low Each backend (Loki/Tempo/Mimir/Pyroscope) bills on its own meter. |
| Self-host effort | Heavy | Heavy |
| Maturity | Incumbent | Incumbent |
| Protocols | PrometheusSNMP | |
| The catch | Single-node by design — no native HA or long-term storage — so any serious deployment becomes a 4-5 component stack (Alertmanager, Grafana, Thanos/Mimir, exporters) you assemble and operate yourself. | It's a stack of separate systems, not one product — metrics cardinality is the silent budget-killer (a misconfigured K8s label can be $1k+/mo), and self-hosting LGTM well needs real distributed-systems expertise. |
First-hand data
data as of Jun 24, 2026
- Significant incidents · 90d
- 434 critical · 21 major · 18 minor
- Incident-minutes logged
- 27.4 dayscumulative, not downtime
- Last incident
- Jun 22, 2026
Polled first-hand from each vendor's public status page & GitHub. "Significant" excludes informational notices & planned maintenance; incident-minutes sum per-incident durations (not platform downtime). Method & full data →
Which should you pick?
Pick Prometheus if…
You want zero license cost and full control, have somewhere to run it, and treat operating the stack (HA, long-term storage, upgrades) as work worth owning.
Full Prometheus profile →Pick Grafana Cloud / LGTM if…
You'd rather not run and scale Prometheus, Alertmanager and long-term storage yourself — Grafana Cloud's free tier and managed back-end trade a subscription for your weekends.
Full Grafana Cloud / LGTM profile →FAQ
Is Grafana Cloud just hosted Prometheus?
Partly. Grafana Cloud ingests Prometheus-compatible metrics into a managed, horizontally-scalable back-end (Mimir) and adds managed Loki for logs and Tempo for traces, plus Grafana itself. So it is hosted Prometheus-compatible metrics and more — you keep PromQL and exporters but hand off running and scaling the storage.
Do I need long-term storage with self-hosted Prometheus?
For anything beyond days-to-weeks of history, yes. Vanilla Prometheus is single-node with short local retention and no HA, so durable history means bolting on Thanos, Mimir or VictoriaMetrics. Grafana Cloud handles that for you; self-hosting means you operate it.
Built from the monitoring tool database — same facts, everywhere they appear. Last reviewed against vendor sources; pricing drifts, so verify before you sign anything.