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Hertzbeat vs Grafana Mimir

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?
HE Hertzbeat Real-time monitoring system with customizable templates VS Grafana Mimir Scalable long-term storage for Prometheus metrics
FeatureHertzbeatGrafana Mimir
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score91 · Excellent90 · Excellent
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseApache-2.0AGPL-3.0
LanguageJavaGo
Setup difficultyMediumHard
Min. RAM1,024 MB1,024 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metaldocker, kubernetes, helm
GitHub stars★ 7,405★ 5,238
First released20222022
ReplacesZabbix, DatadogDatadog, Chronosphere

What are Hertzbeat and Grafana Mimir?

Hertzbeat

HertzBeat is an open-source real-time monitoring system that checks websites, APIs, databases, servers, and more using customizable YAML templates. It includes alerting and a friendly dashboard with no agents required.

  • Agentless monitoring
  • Customizable YAML templates
  • Threshold alerting
  • Built-in dashboards

Read the full Hertzbeat guide →

Grafana Mimir

Grafana Mimir is an open-source, horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant time series database for Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics. It is designed to store and query hundreds of millions of active series.

  • Massive cardinality support
  • Multi-tenant by design
  • Fast query engine
  • Object storage backend

Read the full Grafana Mimir guide →

Hertzbeat vs Grafana Mimir: key differences

Hertzbeat is written in Java, while Grafana Mimir is built with Go. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Hertzbeat versus AGPL-3.0 for Grafana Mimir.

Why pick each one

Choose Hertzbeat if…

  • No agents to deploy
  • Flexible templates

Watch out for

  • JVM resource needs
  • Newer project
Hertzbeat details

Choose Grafana Mimir if…

  • Proven at billion-series scale
  • Easier to operate than Cortex

Watch out for

  • Resource intensive
  • Complex for small homelabs
Grafana Mimir details

Frequently asked questions

Is Hertzbeat or Grafana Mimir better?

Hertzbeat is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler medium setup. Consider Grafana Mimir if its specific feature set fits your needs better.

Are Hertzbeat and Grafana Mimir free and open-source?

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

Can I run Hertzbeat and Grafana Mimir with Docker?

Hertzbeat: yes. Grafana Mimir: yes.

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