Grafana vs Smokeping Prober

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
FeatureGrafanaSmokeping Prober
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseAGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
LanguageTypeScriptGo
Setup difficultyMediumEasy
Min. RAM512 MB64 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metal, helmdocker, binary, kubernetes
GitHub stars★ 76,153★ 729
First released20142018
ReplacesDatadogSmokePing, PingPlotter

Why pick each one

Choose Grafana if…

  • Beautiful flexible dashboards
  • Broad data source support
  • Strong community
Grafana details

Choose Smokeping Prober if…

  • Drop-in for Prometheus stacks
  • Very lightweight
Smokeping Prober details

Frequently asked questions

Is Grafana or Smokeping Prober better?

Neither is universally better. Grafana has the larger community, while Smokeping Prober is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.

Are Grafana and Smokeping Prober free and open-source?

Yes. Grafana is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Smokeping Prober under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Grafana and Smokeping Prober with Docker?

Grafana: yes. Smokeping Prober: yes.

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