Ruben Zimmermann
Infrastructure Architect, SIG
Compare · The Grafana alternative
SquaredUp vs Grafana
The modern platform for your observability dashboards.
Out-of-the-box dashboards in under 5 minutes • Nothing to ingest
Service health
Azure · AWS · Prometheus · SCOM · Azure DevOps · ServiceNow
Payments
Healthy
7 sources
Customer portal
Degraded
5 sources
Data platform
Healthy
4 sources
Identity
Healthy
3 sources
Customer portal Drilldown
AKS clusterPrometheus
App Service p95 latencyAzure Monitor
SQL clusterSCOM
Release pipelineAzure DevOps
Open incidents ServiceNow
2
P2 · Portal slow logins
Azure spend MTD
Not just for technical folk
Roll up views designed for leadership, with the detail one click away.
Your whole stack
100+ data sources that cover SRE, ITOps, DevOps, FinOps, SecOps and more.
Nothing to ingest
Each tool is queried when you open the dashboard. No per-GB charges.
Modern clean design
Modern, unfussy dashboards that look good everywhere.
Why switch
Why look for a Grafana alternative?
Grafana is a popular commercial open-source dashboard, with deep roots in Prometheus and time series visualization. Here’s why you may be considering something different.
A learning curve that never flattens
Every product has a learning curve. But doing simple things like setting up an alert on your data should be, well, simple.
Too complicated for leadership
Dashboards full of metrics look great, but don't tell you what's happening. Your leadership want clean, easy-to-understand views that give a clear picture.
Sharing costs that don't look so good at scale
Anyone who signs in to look at a dashboard counts as an active user that month. That's fine for one team, but it adds up when the whole organization needs access.
You don't want to pay to ingest data
Grafana Cloud includes Prometheus, Loki and Tempo, each billed by series or by GB. If your data already lives in Azure, AWS or Datadog, you shouldn't have to pay to move it.
You want a vendor-neutral top layer
Grafana Labs also sells the monitoring and observability stack underneath, meaning they compete with the tools you're trying to aggregate.
What actually is Grafana?
’Grafana’ refers to the visualization layer and also the whole data stack (Grafana Cloud). SquaredUp is an alternative to the visualization layer — it plugs into the data you already have.
Use cases
Visibility for everyone
From the cluster to the board meeting.
Health roll-up for leadership
RollUp combines status from every tool behind a service into one tile. Leads see red, amber or green, and drill down when they need the detail.
End-to-end service performance
Metrics, alerts, incidents and cost for one service on one dashboard, whether they come from Azure Monitor, Prometheus or ServiceNow.
Hybrid-cloud monitoring
Monitor your infrastructure wherever it lives, and whatever it runs on. From Serverless and Kubernetes to VMware and SolarWinds.
DevOps metrics
Deployment frequency, lead time and change failure rate from Azure DevOps or GitHub, next to the Jira work behind them.
ITOps reporting
Incidents and SLAs from ServiceNow next to Microsoft 365 service health, Defender alerts and Copilot adoption, on a dashboard you can share with the rest of the business.
“Using SquaredUp has allowed us to finally deliver dashboards to management that are actually relevant to them.”
Side by side
SquaredUp vs Grafana – how they compare
Compared on visibility across a whole stack, rather than on Prometheus dashboards. Grafana details are from Grafana Labs' own documentation and pricing page, as of November 2026.
SquaredUp | Grafana | |
|---|---|---|
| Target audience | Visibility across your whole stack, for everyone who needs it. | Visualizing metrics, logs and traces, centred on Prometheus and the Grafana Cloud stack. |
| Who builds dashboards | Anyone. Start from ready-made data streams, or ask an AI assistant to build one. | Engineers who can write the query behind each panel. |
| Your data | Queries each tool where the data lives. Nothing is ingested or stored. | Queries data sources directly, or ingests into Grafana Cloud and bills by series and by GB. |
| Integrations | 100+ data sources, strongest across Microsoft, ITSM, MSP tools, monitoring and DevOps. Add anything else with an API using Low Code Plugins. No premium plugin tier. | A large plugin library, with particular breadth in databases and IoT. ServiceNow, Splunk, Dynatrace and Datadog need Enterprise plugins at a higher per-user price. |
| Health roll-up | RollUp combines status across dashboards and tools into a hierarchy, with drilldown. | No native roll-up. |
| AI | SmartViz, the SquaredUp dashboard assistant, is included on every tier. | Grafana Assistant is an add-on, billed per active user. |
| Sharing | Pay once to share a dashboard, no matter how many people look at it. | Every user who signs in during the month is billed as an active user. |
| Cross-integration | SquaredUp is a universal top layer. Roll up your Grafana dashboards and alert rules into SquaredUp, alongside everything else. | No data source for SquaredUp. |
What engineers say
“We evaluated SquaredUp and Grafana, and from the very first moments I could tell that SquaredUp was just going to be easier to use.”
Andre Ghanima
.NET + DevOps Developer, Evidi
Where the data sources differ
Both have large plugin libraries, and many sources are covered by both. These are examples of the ones only one side has, from each vendor's plugin catalog as of November 2026.
Only in SquaredUp
Examples
Microsoft and ITOps
Microsoft 365, PowerShell, Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Purview, Azure Cost, SharePoint, SCOM
ITSM and incident response
HaloITSM, Freshdesk, Ivanti ITSM, TeamDynamix, incident.io, Rootly
AI
M365 Copilot, Claude Console
MSP, RMM and backup
HaloPSA, ConnectWise PSA, Datto RMM, N-able N-central, NinjaOne, Autotask, Huntress, Redstor, Wasabi WACM, Auvik, Veeam
Monitoring, network and uptime
Nagios XI, Zabbix, eG Enterprise, Quest Foglight, ThousandEyes, Cisco DNA, UniFi, Pingdom, UptimeRobot, Checkly, Zscaler Trust Status, Grafana
DevOps
CircleCI, Octopus Deploy, AWS CodePipeline, JFrog Artifactory, LaunchDarkly, CodeRabbit
Security
1Password, Snyk, CrowdStrike Falcon
Product, web and SaaS
Amplitude, PostHog, Pendo, Google Search Console, Algolia, Typesense, Notion, Figma, Sanity, Vercel, DigitalOcean, DigiCert, SendGrid
Some fun
NASA, OpenF1, Fantasy Premier League, Spotify, Steam, Google Health
Only in Grafana
Examples
Databases
CockroachDB, Databricks, Druid, GizmoSQL, Graphite, IBM Db2, Neo4j, OpenTSDB, Oracle Database, Redis, SAP HANA, SQLite, Yugabyte
Monitoring
Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope, Zipkin, Axiom, Catchpoint, Honeycomb, Instana, ITRS Analytics, LogicMonitor, SevOne, Wavefront
Network
Kentik, Akvorado, Infoblox, Cisco ASA, Cisco ISE, Cisco Meraki
Infrastructure
Dell PowerScale, NetApp ONTAP, Kubecost, DoiT, Netlify, Drone CI
Security
Akamai, FortiGate, Palo Alto, Prisma Compute, Proofpoint TAP, Qualys, Rubrik, Wiz, HackerOne, Zscaler ZDX
IoT, industrial and streaming
MQTT, Kafka, RabbitMQ, WebSocket, gRPC, OPC-UA, OSIsoft PI, openHistorian, Cognite, FROST SensorThings, Haystack, Helin, Nominal
Connect everything with Low Code Plugins
Missing a data source? If a tool has an API, you can add it to SquaredUp. Low Code Plugins describe an integration with very little code, so they're quick to build and easy to maintain.
The LCP AI toolkit does most of the work. Point GitHub Copilot or Claude at the tool's API docs and it does the rest. Our own builds have taken as little as an hour from first prompt to working data source.
claude
> /build-plugin Add a data source for our internal release API. Docs are at docs.example.com/api
Explored the API: 14 endpointsDone
Plan approved: 4 data streams, 2 object typesDone
Deployed to your organizationDone
Tested each data stream against live dataDone
Starter dashboard createdReady
SmartVizDashboard assistant
Build a service health dashboard for the customer portal from Azure Monitor, Prometheus and ServiceNow.
Created Customer portal · Health with 6 tiles: p95 latency, error rate, AKS pod restarts, open incidents, recent deploys and Azure cost.
412ms
p95 latency
0.3%
Error rate
2
Open incidents
Add a tile for deploys this week…Send
AI assistance — free for every user
Describe what you need and SmartViz, the SquaredUp dashboard assistant, builds the dashboard, ready to edit and share. It's included on every tier, with no per-user add-on.
If your teams work in Claude or Copilot, SquaredUp's MCP server connects there too.
Easy alerting and sharing
Turn any tile into a monitor in a few clicks. Set the threshold and choose where notifications go: email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow or a webhook. There are no alert rules to write and no notification policies to configure.
Sharing is just as quick. Send a live dashboard as a link, limit it to people with your company's email domain, or send it out as a scheduled report.
Customer portal
Azure Monitor · Prometheus · ServiceNow
Share
p95 latency Azure Monitor
Enable monitoring
Warn above 400 ms · Notify Teams #platform-ops
Leadership view
1 service degraded4 services · 9 teams
99.95%
Availability
97%
SLA met
Rolls up
Services
Payments
Healthy
Customer portal
Degraded
Data platform
Healthy
Identity
Healthy
Rolls up
Customer portal: team dashboards and monitors
AKS clusterPrometheus
p95 latencyAzure Monitor
SQL clusterSCOM
Release pipelineAzure DevOps
KPIs and status roll-up
RollUp builds a hierarchy from your dashboards. Each service takes its status from the tiles and monitors beneath it, and each team's workspace rolls up into the view above. Leadership sees one red, amber or green status per service, and anyone can drill down to find the cause.
Track KPIs like availability, SLA performance and cloud spend in the same place, so the numbers that get reported come from the same live data the engineers use.
Pricing
Pay for visibility, not data
You pay for the people who build dashboards and for each dashboard you share. The number of viewers and the volume of data don't add to the bill.
$0
No ingestion charges
SquaredUp doesn't store your metrics, logs or traces, so there's nothing to bill per GB or per series.
∞
Unlimited viewers
Pay once to share a dashboard, no matter how many people look at it. Viewers don't need a license.
100+
Integrations included
ServiceNow, Splunk, Dynatrace and Datadog are standard plugins, with no premium tier to unlock them.
FAQ about SquaredUp and Grafana
Yes. The Prometheus plugin queries your Prometheus server with PromQL, and you can combine the results with any other data source on the same dashboard.
No. SquaredUp is the layer on top of your data. You continue to use Azure Monitor, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Datadog and whatever else you already run.
No. SquaredUp reads data from each tool when you need it, rather than ingesting it into its own store.
Yes. The Grafana plugin brings the status of your Grafana dashboards and alert rules into SquaredUp, next to your other data sources.
Yes. SquaredUp Dashboard Server runs in your own environment. It is designed specifically the for Microsoft stack.
Out-of-the-box dashboards are ready in under 5 minutes.
See your own stack in SquaredUp
Connect Azure, Prometheus or Grafana and get an out-of-the-box dashboard in under 5 minutes. Nothing to ingest.
Sources
- Grafana Labs, pricing page (grafana.com/pricing), November 2026.
- Grafana Labs, "Users pricing": definition of a billable active user (grafana.com/docs).
- Grafana Labs, "Share dashboards and panels" (grafana.com/docs).
- Grafana Labs, Grafana Enterprise features and Enterprise data source plugins (grafana.com/docs).
- SquaredUp, "SquaredUp vs Grafana: The Enterprise IT dashboard showdown", March 2026.
- SquaredUp, "Leading Microsoft experts, Evidi, deliver 360° Azure monitoring".
Comparison last reviewed November 2026. Grafana is a trademark of Grafana Labs. Spotted something out of date? Email [email protected] and we'll fix it.