This page compares Grafana, in both its open source and Grafana Cloud forms, with LiveTrace on the thing that actually decides the outcome for a service desk: how much of the monitoring stack arrives built, and how much of it you build. Vendor facts come from Grafana Labs public pages, last checked September 2026.
LiveTrace vs Grafana at a glance
| Aspect | LiveTrace | Grafana |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Unified IT, cloud, OT, IoT and physical in one platform | Dashboards and alerting over data sources you run; Grafana Cloud adds hosted metrics, logs and traces |
| Pricing | One simple price per node per month | Free to install; Grafana Cloud meters metric series, gigabytes and active users separately |
| Published pricing | Per node, every rate on our website | Cloud rates published; Enterprise from a 25,000 dollar annual commit |
| Cost predictability | One flat figure per node, fully predictable | Three meters that grow independently; open source cost is engineering time |
| OT, IoT and physical | Built in, including CCTV and building systems | Only what you write or find an exporter for; nothing physical out of the box |
| Predict and prevent | Built in, flags failures before they cause outages | Metric forecasting in Cloud; no estate wide failure prediction or remediation |
| Event Intelligence | Built in, one ticket per real issue, faster MTTR | Rule based alerting with grouping; correlation into incidents is yours to build |
| Data retention | Up to ten years, included | Open source, whatever you provision; Cloud Pro 13 months of metrics, 30 days of logs |
| Polling | Matched to each source, with its real update rate shown beside ours | Set per exporter and scrape job; you own every interval |
| Multi-tenant and MSP | Native, built in from day one | Organisations and teams exist; proper client separation is a stack per client or an Enterprise conversation |
| Data sovereignty | Your region (UK, US, Asia), UK owned | Self hosted wherever you run it; Cloud in Grafana Labs regions |
Why teams go looking for a Grafana alternative
It is rarely Grafana itself. It is the stack around it. A working Grafana deployment for a real estate is Grafana plus Prometheus or Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, an exporter for every class of device (node exporter, SNMP exporter, blackbox exporter, Windows exporter, and so on), Alertmanager or Grafana Alerting with rules you write, an on call tool, and dashboards somebody designed. Each part is excellent and each part is a thing you now operate. Teams that started with a free download find that eighteen months later they have a monitoring platform with a headcount attached, that the person who built it is the only one who understands it, and that adding a new kind of device means finding or writing another exporter before anything can be seen.
The second reason is what Grafana does not attempt. It shows you signals; it does not decide which of two hundred firing alerts are the same underlying fault, rank them by business impact, or tell you which device is about to fail. Those are the jobs a service desk actually needs done, and in a Grafana stack they are either built by hand or not done at all.
The third is multi-tenancy. Grafana has organisations and teams, and Grafana Cloud has proper role based access, but running many clients with real separation and shared operations is either a stack per client or an Enterprise engagement, which is exactly the instance sprawl MSPs are trying to escape.
Where Grafana is strong
Credit where due: nothing visualises time series data better, the plugin and data source ecosystem is enormous, dashboards as code fits modern engineering teams perfectly, and the open source edition costs nothing to download. Grafana Cloud has a genuinely generous free tier and packages the backends so you do not have to run Mimir, Loki and Tempo yourself. For a platform engineering team that wants total control of its observability, enjoys building it, and has the people to keep it running, Grafana is the right answer, and that is why so much of the industry runs on it.
Where LiveTrace differs
A platform, not a project. Collection, correlation, prioritisation, prediction, retention and the service desk view are one hosted product. There is no exporter to write, no scrape config to tune, no Alertmanager to wire up, and no person whose departure takes the monitoring with them.
The whole estate, not the metrics you exported. LiveTrace polls over one hundred vendors across network, servers, cloud, databases and OT/IoT natively, with SNMP at the core, and puts CCTV and building systems in the same window. Event Intelligence raises one ticket per real issue, Predict and Prevent flags failures before they become outages, and context-aware prioritisation ranks what is left by business impact. What your service desk sees is incidents, not panels.
Multi-tenant by design. MSPs and telcos run many clients in one platform with proper separation, one operational view across all of them, and no stack per client.
No stack to own. We host, maintain and update the platform, with UK, US or Asia hosting and up to ten years of retention included. Your history does not depend on how much disk you gave Prometheus, and your ability to see last year does not cost extra.
Pricing compared
Grafana open source is free to download and run; the cost is the servers, the storage and the engineering time to operate the stack around it. Grafana Cloud is metered. The Free tier includes 10,000 active metric series, 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles, three active users and 14 days of retention. The Pro tier starts at a 19 dollar monthly platform fee plus usage: 6.50 dollars per 1,000 active metric series, 0.55 dollars per GB of logs across ingest, write and retain, and 8 dollars per active user, with 13 months of metric retention and 30 days for logs. Enterprise starts at a 25,000 dollar annual commit. All figures as published September 2026. Three meters that each grow on their own is the point: a busier estate, a chattier device or a new team member each moves the bill, and forecasting it means forecasting all three.
LiveTrace prices per node, with simple, predictable pricing and no surprise charges, set out on our pricing page. A node is a device. Count your devices once and you have your number, and the number of series, gigabytes or people looking at it does not change it.
Pricing and features checked September 2026; always verify current terms with the vendor.
Migrating from Grafana
One: inventory what Grafana is actually showing you and which exporters feed it, because that list is your device estate, and let us scan it for the real count. Two: run in parallel for a couple of weeks; LiveTrace polls over SNMP, WMI and APIs, so it sits alongside your exporters without conflict. Three: map alert rules to ticket rules, and expect the list to shrink, since most estates find hundreds of firing rules collapse into a short list of incidents once correlation is applied. Four: decide what to keep. Some teams retain a Grafana instance for a handful of bespoke engineering dashboards, which is fine; the service desk does not need to live there. MSPs consolidating a stack per client can bring them into one multi-tenant platform as part of onboarding.
Frequently asked questions
Is LiveTrace a Grafana replacement or something different?
Something different that covers the same ground. Grafana is the dashboard layer of a stack you assemble; LiveTrace is the whole stack, collection through service desk, delivered as one hosted platform. If your question is "can we stop running Prometheus, exporters and Alertmanager and still see everything", the answer is yes.
We already run Grafana and Prometheus. What would we actually stop doing?
Writing and maintaining exporters, tuning scrape configs, authoring and pruning alert rules, sizing and backing up the metrics store, and hand building the views your service desk uses. You would keep the outcome, which is seeing the estate, and lose the operating overhead.
Do I have to maintain and update the system?
No. Grafana open source is software you run and upgrade yourself, along with everything that feeds it; LiveTrace is hosted, maintained and updated by us.
Can LiveTrace monitor the same kit as Grafana?
Grafana monitors whatever you have an exporter for. LiveTrace supports over one hundred vendors across network, servers, cloud, databases and OT/IoT natively, with SNMP monitoring at the core, see our vendors page, and bring anything unusual to the demo.
Stop building the stack. Start running the estate.
Data residency and AI processing: choose where your data lives (UK, US or Asia). AI processing uses Microsoft’s Azure AI service under our data processing agreement; summarised context only, raw telemetry never leaves your tenant, and processing may occur outside your chosen region.
Comparison prepared by LiveTrace from publicly available information and typical or standard configurations as of September 2026. Competitor capabilities vary by edition, tier and paid add-ons and may change. All product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners. LiveTrace is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any named vendor. Provided for general information, not advice.