Grafana vs. SigNoz: Self-Hosted Monitoring Compared
A detailed comparison of Grafana and SigNoz for self-hosted monitoring — dashboards, alerting, traces, logs, and total cost of ownership.
Monitoring is essential for any self-hosted stack. Grafana is the established leader with a vast plugin ecosystem, while SigNoz is the all-in-one newcomer that claims to replace Grafana + Prometheus + Jaeger. Both are available in better-openclaw — here's how they compare.
Grafana: The Ecosystem Play
Grafana excels as a visualization layer that connects to dozens of data sources: Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and many more. Its flexibility is unmatched — you can build custom dashboards for any use case. The trade-off is complexity: a full Grafana stack requires multiple services (Grafana + Prometheus + Loki + Tempo), each needing separate configuration.
SigNoz: All-in-One Simplicity
SigNoz combines metrics, traces, and logs in a single binary using OpenTelemetry as its ingestion standard. Setup is dramatically simpler — deploy one service instead of four. The dashboard builder is modern and intuitive. The trade-off is a smaller plugin ecosystem and fewer community dashboards compared to Grafana's decade-old library.
Which Fits Your Stack?
Use Grafana if you need maximum flexibility, custom data sources, or have an existing Prometheus setup. Use SigNoz if you want simplicity, prefer OpenTelemetry-native instrumentation, or want traces and logs without managing multiple services. For small homelabs, SigNoz's simplicity wins. For production infrastructure with complex monitoring needs, Grafana's ecosystem is hard to beat.