Epok vs Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud is the hosted LGTM stack — Grafana dashboards over Mimir (metrics), Loki (logs), and Tempo (traces). It's powerful and open, and it's dashboard-first: you build the panels and alert rules. Epok is detection-first — it watches every signal, tells you what broke, and cites the evidence, with no dashboards or rules to build. If you want the stack to catch problems instead of waiting for someone to read a panel, read on.
Representative production boundary · shadow mode · no cutover · pre-agreed scorecard
Keep Grafana Cloud. Make Epok prove what it adds.
Choose a representative boundary
Mirror a service group, ownership domain, environment, or critical user journey through OTel or an open shipper.
Keep every alert
Grafana Cloud remains the control while Epok watches the same production window.
Score the incident cohort
Classify correct, incorrect, abstained, and missed outcomes; measure alert fanout, time to verified cause, and responder effort.
Success is not “data arrived” or one anecdote. Expansion requires performance across the agreed incident cohort and operational gates.
| Dimension | Grafana Cloud | Epok |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The hosted Grafana stack — Mimir metrics, Loki logs, Tempo traces, Pyroscope profiles — plus visualization and incident response. | A multi-signal detection engine. Logs, metrics, traces, infrastructure, RUM and session replay correlated on one incident canvas. |
| Billing basis | Composable and usage-based: metrics per 1k active series; logs, traces and profiles metered separately to process, write and retain; plus per-active-user charges for visualization and IRM. | Each plan includes one unified volume allowance. Paid-plan overage is $0.20/GB; there is no per-host, per-user, per-custom-metric, per-query or cardinality line. |
| Who runs it | Fully managed by Grafana Labs, with bring-your-own-cloud and dedicated options on Enterprise plans. | Hosted SaaS. Nothing for you to deploy, scale or upgrade. |
| Data collection | Grafana Alloy, Prometheus remote-write, OpenTelemetry. | No proprietary Epok server agent: send with OTLP or an open shipper such as Vector, Fluent Bit, Fluentd or the OpenTelemetry Collector. Browser RUM and replay require web instrumentation. |
| How detection is set up | Grafana Alerting rules you author; Grafana Cloud adds machine-learning forecasting, anomaly detection and Sift investigations. | Immediate rule packs begin matching supported signals as data arrives. Statistical detectors activate after they have the required history and signal coverage; threshold rules remain available when you want them. |
Grafana Cloud facts checked against Grafana Cloud pricing on 2026-08-03. Vendors change packaging and pricing — tell us if anything here has gone out of date and we'll fix it.
Where Grafana Cloud wins
Grafana Cloud is a superb, open, scalable stack. Grafana dashboards are the industry standard, Mimir handles enormous metric cardinality, and the whole thing is open-source-backed and portable. If your team wants to own its visualization layer, run Prometheus-compatible metrics at scale, and build exactly the panels and alerts it wants, Grafana Cloud is the better fit. Epok is the opposite bet: less dashboarding, far more automatic detection and cited root cause out of the box.
- —You want the stack to catch problems automatically — not to build and maintain dashboards and alert rules.
- —You want cited root cause and cross-signal correlation without pivoting across three data sources by hand.
- —You want a flat price with no active-series or per-GB tax.
- —Your team doesn't have the time or platform depth to run and tune the LGTM stack.
- —You want best-in-class dashboards and the Grafana plugin ecosystem.
- —You run Prometheus-compatible metrics at very large scale (Mimir).
- —Open-source portability and owning your visualization layer matter to you.
- —Your team is happy building and maintaining its own panels and alert rules.
Add Epok as a second destination first.
Already on Prometheus or Loki? Add Epok as an additional destination — Prometheus remote_write and Loki push both flow straight into Epok's intelligence layer.
Traces and OTLP telemetry export to Epok with a collector config change, so your existing Grafana Cloud setup keeps working unchanged.
Run them side by side: keep Grafana for dashboards and let Epok watch the same data, then compare what it catches on its own.
Keep Grafana Cloud. Make Epok prove the incident outcome.
Run a controlled shadow evaluation across a representative boundary. Compare both systems on the same incident cohort, then expand only after Epok clears the agreed quality, security, and operational gates.
* Capability comparisons, and any time or effort estimates, reflect our reading of publicly documented features and our own deployment experience as of August 3, 2026. They may not capture every plan, feature, or recent change — verify current capabilities directly with each vendor.
Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Elastic, Grafana, Loki, Amazon CloudWatch, and other product and company names are trademarks of their respective owners. Epok is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by them.