Kubernetes Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Jan 2, 2026 4 min read

Cluster Monitoring Stack 2026

Prometheus + Grafana? Or vendor? The decision.

Self-hosted

Prometheus + Grafana + Loki. Open source.

Operational cost; flexibility.

Datadog, Grafana Cloud, Honeycomb.

Higher cost; less ops.

Small/medium teams: vendor. Larger with capacity: self-hosted.

Migration is possible but rare.