monoscope vs Grafana

A Grafana alternative that keeps the request body, not only the span

Grafana Cloud stores the logs, traces and metrics you send it, and it’s cheap per GB. What it can’t show you is a body nobody captured. monoscope keeps every request and response, yours and your suppliers’, and its AI SRE investigates with them.

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Side by side

What you get, and what it costs

monoscope compared with Grafana
monoscopeGrafanaGrafana Cloud
Request and response bodies, in and out Every call, unsampled on paid plans —
Breaking changes in third-party APIs Caught in the stored responses Not in public docs
AI sees the full request Yes Grafana Assistant works from your logs, traces and metrics
AI investigates the root cause Built in, answers in Slack Assistant Investigations; PRs from Managed Sandboxes are in public preview
Pricing
  • $29/month for 20M events
  • then $1 per million
  • Bodies and metrics included
  • No host or indexing fees
  • $19/month Pro platform fee
  • $0.05/GB processed + $0.40/GB written (logs, traces)
  • $6.50 per 1k metric series
  • $0.75 per 1k frontend sessions
  • $20 per active Assistant user
Open source and self-hosting AGPL-3.0, free to self-host Grafana, Loki, Tempo and Mimir under AGPLv3
Data in your own bucket Session replays in your S3 today, +$199/month Logs export to your bucket; BYOC through sales
Coverage Logs, traces, metrics, errors and session replay Logs, traces, metrics, profiles, frontend, synthetics and incident response; session replay in preview
Sources and assumptions

Checked against Grafana’s public pricing pages and docs in October 2026. List prices, annual billing where offered. — means we couldn’t confirm it from public docs. Spotted something out of date? Email [email protected] and we’ll fix it.

Which one fits your team

Choose monoscope if

  • You need the request and response body behind a failed call, including calls to third-party APIs
  • You want errors, breaking API changes and an AI SRE on the data without wiring them up yourself
  • You’d rather pay per event than per GB written, per metric series and per AI user

Choose Grafana if

  • Your team already runs Grafana dashboards and Prometheus, and metrics are most of your data
  • You ingest at high volume and the lowest price per GB matters more than payloads
  • You want to self-host the LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) on your own object storage

Already on Grafana?

Run monoscope next to it for a week or two, compare which errors and API changes each one catches, then move your services over. An engineer from our team can help.

See pricing All comparisons

What it costs

What you’d pay at three volumes

Same workload on both: logs and spans only, about 2 kB each, kept 30 days. On ingest alone, Grafana Cloud costs about the same or less. Bodies you add there count toward GB written; here they’re free.

Monthly cost on monoscope and Grafana
Events a monthmonoscopeGrafana
20M (40 GB)$29About $21
100M (200 GB)$109About $69
1B (2 TB)$1,009About $879

Grafana Cloud Pro list prices checked 29 October 2026: $19 platform fee, $0.05 per GB processed, $0.40 per GB written after the free 50 GB (we assume 50 GB each for logs and traces, the lower estimate), 30 days of retention included. Volume discounts can lower it; metric series, host-hours and Assistant users add to it. monoscope: $29 a month includes 20M events and 20M metric datapoints, then $1 per million events. Bodies don’t add to the count.

What you keep

What Grafana doesn’t keep, and monoscope does

  • The request and response body

    Grafana stores what your instrumentation sends, and OpenTelemetry doesn’t send bodies. monoscope’s SDKs keep headers, request body and response body on the span, and bodies don’t add to the price.

  • Calls to your suppliers

    Outgoing calls to payment, shipping or auth APIs are kept with their bodies, linked to the incoming request, and checked for breaking changes.

  • An AI that reads both

    The AI SRE investigates with the failing request and response in front of it, answers in Slack and reviews pull requests before merge.

Move over

Move from Grafana in three steps

  1. 1

    Add a monoscope exporter to your collector

    Add an OTLP exporter for monoscope next to the Grafana Cloud one (in Alloy, a second otelcol.exporter.otlp block), so both receive the same traces and logs. Your Grafana dashboards keep running.

  2. 2

    Add the SDK where you want bodies

    OpenTelemetry records the URL and status, not the body. The monoscope SDK for your framework keeps request and response bodies once you switch body capture on, plus outgoing calls.

  3. 3

    Compare, then decide

    Run both for a week or two and compare what each one catches. Move traces and logs over when you’re ready. An engineer from our team can help.

Start for free Collector setup guide

otel-collector.yaml

exporters:
  otlp_grpc/monoscope:
    endpoint: "otelcol.monoscope.tech:4317"
    tls:
      insecure: true
    headers:
      x-api-key: YOUR_API_KEY

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      # keep your current exporter in the list
      exporters: [otlp_grpc/monoscope]
    logs:
      exporters: [otlp_grpc/monoscope]

Know what happened. Prove it.

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