Monitoring and observability
Datadog is a hosted service; Grafana has 4 supported release lines. Grafana 13.0 reaches end of life on Jan 9, 2027. Datadog is a proprietary service; Grafana is open source (AGPL-3.0). OSV.dev lists 1 advisory from the last 12 months for Datadog’s dd-trace and 11 for Grafana.
Last checked against Datadog Status, npm, deps.dev, OSV.dev, CISA KEV, Grafana Status and endoflife.date.
Every value links to its source. Where a row doesn’t apply to one of them, the cell says why.
| Compared on |  Datadog |  Grafana |
|---|---|---|
| Support and releases | ||
| Supported release lines | Hosted service: no versions to upgrade | |
| Latest release | ||
| Releases in the last 12 months | ||
| Security | ||
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | ||
| OpenSSF Scorecard | ||
| Status and incidents | ||
| Status now | Operational | Disruption Phone call notifications to numbers in Russia and Kazakhstan are blocked (and 1 more) |
| Incidents in the last 90 days | ||
| Licence and hosting | ||
| Licence | Proprietary service Not open source SDK (dd-trace): Apache-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause. | AGPL-3.0 Open source (copyleft) Grafana Labs relicensed from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3 in 2021. Self-hosting unmodified is fine; if you modify Grafana and serve it to users, you must publish your changes. |
| How you run it | Managed by Datadog; you run its agent and tracers | Self-host Grafana, or Grafana Cloud, the vendor’s managed service |
| Adoption | ||
| npm downloads last week | Not an npm package | |
| GitHub stars | Hosted service: no public repository | |
| Datadog | Grafana |
|---|---|
| Supported release lines | |
Hosted service: no versions to upgrade | |
| Latest release | |
| Releases in the last 12 months | |
| Datadog | Grafana |
|---|---|
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | |
| OpenSSF Scorecard | |
| Datadog | Grafana |
|---|---|
| Status now | |
Operational | Disruption Phone call notifications to numbers in Russia and Kazakhstan are blocked (and 1 more) |
| Incidents in the last 90 days | |
| Datadog | Grafana |
|---|---|
| Licence | |
Proprietary service Not open source SDK (dd-trace): Apache-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause. | AGPL-3.0 Open source (copyleft) Grafana Labs relicensed from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3 in 2021. Self-hosting unmodified is fine; if you modify Grafana and serve it to users, you must publish your changes. |
| How you run it | |
Managed by Datadog; you run its agent and tracers | Self-host Grafana, or Grafana Cloud, the vendor’s managed service |
| Datadog | Grafana |
|---|---|
| npm downloads last week | |
Not an npm package | |
| GitHub stars | |
Hosted service: no public repository | |
Read across for what matters to you. Each answer comes from the data above or the project’s licence and hosting options.
| If you need | Datadog | Grafana |
|---|---|---|
| An open-source licence | No: Proprietary service | Yes: AGPL-3.0 |
| Someone else runs it for you | Yes: From Datadog | Yes: From Grafana Cloud |
| You can run it on your own servers | No: Hosted only | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | Hosted: nothing to upgrade | 12.4 is supported until May 24, 2027 |
| A public incident history | Yes: Status page with 90-day history | Yes: Status page with 90-day history |
| Datadog | Grafana |
|---|---|
| An open-source licence | |
No: Proprietary service | Yes: AGPL-3.0 |
| Someone else runs it for you | |
Yes: From Datadog | Yes: From Grafana Cloud |
| You can run it on your own servers | |
No: Hosted only | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | |
Hosted: nothing to upgrade | 12.4 is supported until May 24, 2027 |
| A public incident history | |
Yes: Status page with 90-day history | Yes: Status page with 90-day history |
Comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform
Managed observability stack with Grafana, Prometheus, Loki
From StackPrism’s curated notes. Pricing isn’t covered here: it changes often, so check each vendor’s pricing page.
Datadog is a hosted, proprietary observability platform with its own agent; Grafana is open-source (AGPLv3) dashboarding you can run yourself or use through Grafana Cloud alongside Prometheus, Loki and Tempo. The choice is often between one managed product and an open stack you can host.
Release lines and end-of-life dates come from endoflife.date, release counts from deps.dev’s publish dates, and advisories from OSV.dev, counted once per flaw even when it’s listed under several ids, and checked against CISA’s list of vulnerabilities known to be exploited. Status and incident history come from each vendor’s public status feed; licences from each project’s licence file or the vendor’s licensing page, linked in the table.
The data refreshes every few hours and the time it was checked is shown above. There’s no pricing and no overall winner: which one fits depends on your constraints. To see how the versions you actually run hold up, check your repo.
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