Dynatrace vs Grafana Synthetic Monitoring

From $0.04 per hour per 8 GiB host (full-stack, indicative)

Free tier available

Consumption-based pricing across hosts, synthetic requests, RUM sessions and log volume. Enterprise contracts are large.

Cheap if you already run Grafana Cloud; results are plain Prometheus metrics you already know how to use.

15-day trial.

Included in the Grafana Cloud free tier with a monthly check allowance.

Widely used

Dynatrace · since 2005

Established

Grafana Labs · since 2021

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Large enterprises with complex hybrid estates and a dedicated SRE or operations team.

Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.