Compare Checkmk vs. Grafana

Checkmk is an IT monitoring system that allows system administrators, IT managers and DevOps teams, to quickly identify and resolve issues across their entire IT infrastructure (servers and applications, networks, storage and databases, containers, etc. Checkmk is used daily by more than 2,000 commercial customers worldwide and many other open-source users. Key product features * Service state monitoring with nearly 2,000 checks 'outside the box' * Event-based and log-based monitoring * Metrics, dynamic Graphing, and Long-Term Storage * Comprehensive reporting incl. Accessibility and SLAs * Flexible notifications and automated alert handling * Monitoring business processes and complex systems * Software and hardware inventory * Graphical, rule-based configuration and automated service discovery These are the top use cases * Server Monitoring * Network Monitoring * Application Monitoring * Database Monitoring * Storage Monitoring * Cloud Monitoring * Container Monitoring

Grafana Labs provides an open and composable observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. Recognized as a 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for Observability Platforms and positioned furthest to the right for Completeness of Vision, Grafana Labs supports over 25M users and 5,000+ customers. Grafana Cloud delivers the full power of Grafana’s open and composable observability stack—without the overhead of managing infrastructure. As a fully managed SaaS offering from Grafana Labs, it unifies metrics, logs, and traces in one place, giving engineering teams real-time visibility into systems and applications. Built around the LGTM Stack—Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics—Grafana Cloud provides a scalable foundation for modern observability. With built-in integrations for Kubernetes, cloud services, CI/CD pipelines, and OpenTelemetry, Grafana Cloud accelerates time to value while reducing operational complexity. Grafana Cloud also supports OLAP-style analytics through integrations with data warehouses and analytical engines like BigQuery, ClickHouse, and Druid—enabling multi-dimensional exploration across observability and business data. Teams gain access to powerful features like Adaptive Metrics for cost optimization, incident response workflows, and synthetic monitoring for performance testing—all within a secure, globally distributed platform. Whether you’re modernizing infrastructure, scaling observability, or driving SLO-based performance, Grafana Cloud delivers the insights you need—fast, flexible, and vendor-neutral.