Grafana vs Nagios
No leader: the top candidate Nagios has only 0.17 confidence (low), below the 0.35 needed to declare a winner. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for observability tools. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Grafana
A full-stack observability platform that ingests telemetry data from multiple sources and provides dashboards, alerting, incident management, and AI-assisted troubleshooting. Supports open standards including OpenTelemetry and can be deployed as a cloud service or self-hosted.
Nagios
A free, community-supported monitoring system that helps organizations detect infrastructure issues and prevent downtime by monitoring servers, networks, applications, and services. It offers a modular plugin architecture for extensibility and includes optional web-based dashboards and visualization tools.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Grafana
Free forever tier always available. Pro plans from $19/month + usage with volume discounts. Enterprise from $25,000/year with custom terms.
- FreeFree
- All Grafana Cloud services with limited usage
- Community support
- 14 days retention for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, and k6 performance tests
- ProFrom $19/month + usage with automatic volume discounts
- Everything in Free plan
- Pay as you go above free tier with volume discounts
- 8×5 email support
- 13 months retention for metrics; 30 days retention for logs, traces, profiles, k6 performance tests
- Adaptive Logs and Metrics cost optimization
- EnterpriseContact sales
- Premium support
- Custom retention policies
- Deployment flexibility (Public Cloud, Federal Cloud, or Bring Your Own Cloud)
- As low as $3 per 1k series for metrics at scale
- Custom pricing based on annual commit and volume
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
- Prometheus
- InfluxDB
Grafana
- Loki
- Elasticsearch
- Postgres
- Kubernetes
- AWS
Nagios
- Grafana
- Apache
- Nginx
- IIS
- Tomcat
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Oracle
- SQL Server
- MongoDB
- LDAP
- Active Directory
- JBoss
- WebLogic
- Citrix
- PagerDuty
- Slack
- ServiceNow
- DB2
- EC2
- VMware
- Hyper-V
- MSSQL
- IPMI
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.