Grafana Synthetic Monitoring vs Dynatrace
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free tier available
Free tierFrom $58 per month per 8 GiB host (full-stack), or $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour
PaidWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Cheap if you already run Grafana Cloud; results are plain Prometheus metrics you already know how to use.
Consumption-based pricing across hosts, synthetic requests, RUM sessions and log volume, billed on memory rather than CPU — a large host costs proportionally more. Enterprise contracts are large.
Free tier
Included in the Grafana Cloud free tier with a monthly check allowance.
15-day trial.
Open source
Apache-2.0 (agent)
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Grafana Labs · since 2021
Widely used
Dynatrace · since 2005
Strengths
- Results are Prometheus metrics, so alerting and dashboards use tools you already have.
- Same k6 scripts serve load testing and synthetic monitoring.
- Good free tier within Grafana Cloud.
- Automatic discovery and dependency mapping removes most manual instrumentation work.
- Davis root-cause analysis genuinely reduces alert noise in complex estates.
- Covers mainframe and SAP alongside cloud-native workloads.
Limitations
- Assumes you are in the Grafana ecosystem; standalone it makes little sense.
- Browser checks are less mature than Datadog's or Checkly's.
- Fewer probe locations than the dedicated vendors.
- Expensive, with consumption pricing that is hard to forecast.
- Heavy platform aimed at organisations with a dedicated operations function.
- Overkill for a straightforward web application.
Best for
Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.
Large enterprises with complex hybrid estates and a dedicated SRE or operations team.
All of these integrate with: Slack.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.