Kitaso vs Prometheus and Grafana: a stack to run, or an app to open
Prometheus and Grafana are four or five processes you assemble, configure and host yourself. Kitaso is one app on your Mac. Here is what each side costs and what it gives back.
Prometheus and Grafana are the default open-source answer to monitoring, and above a certain scale they are the right one. The question is whether you are at that scale. Most people with a handful of boxes are not.
What Prometheus and Grafana
means
It is shorthand for four or five separate processes you assemble yourself:
- Prometheus scrapes metrics on a schedule, stores them in its own time-series database, and answers queries in its own query language, PromQL. It also evaluates alert rules.
- node_exporter runs on each host and exposes that host's metrics on a port for Prometheus to scrape.
- Grafana reads from Prometheus and draws the dashboards.
- Alertmanager takes the alerts Prometheus fires and routes, groups and silences them.
- cAdvisor, optionally, for per-container metrics.
All free, all open source, all industrial grade. Nothing below is a knock on the quality.
| Kitaso | Prometheus + Grafana stack | |
|---|---|---|
| You run | One Mac app | Prometheus, node_exporter, Grafana, Alertmanager, often cAdvisor |
| On each server | An optional scheduled collector, no open port | node_exporter on a port, plus exporters per service |
| Setup | Add a host, see a chart | Scrape configs, storage, dashboards, PromQL rules, alert routing |
| Querying | Pick a metric and a time range | PromQL |
| Central host | None, the app is your Mac | Its own always-on box |
| Price | $39 once (1 year of updates included), 2 servers free forever | Free, self-hosted |
What the stack costs when the software is free
Configuration and upkeep. You write scrape configs. You plan retention and storage. You build dashboards, or import someone else's and adjust them. You write alert rules in PromQL and routing in YAML. The components support TLS and basic auth, but not by default, so in practice every exporter and port stays off the public internet behind firewall rules or a private network. There are thirty-minute docker-compose demos for all of this; a thirty-minute production setup is not a thing.
Grafana is the one piece of this I have run myself, and not for long. Getting a chart on screen was quick. Knowing it well enough to change it confidently was not: the query editor, the datasource settings, template variables, panel options, and the gap between what a dashboard asks for and what Prometheus actually stores. It is a skill you keep up, and it decays if you touch it twice a year.
The stack also wants a home: an always-on box of its own. Watching a few small servers means standing up another server, and on small boxes that stack can use more memory than the applications it is watching.
What you get in exchange
Real things. A shared Grafana that is always up and readable by a whole team from any browser. PromQL, which answers questions Kitaso cannot: rates of change, percentiles across hosts, arbitrary math over any series. An exporter for nearly everything. Alertmanager routing for actual on-call schedules, firing around the clock from a machine that is always on. Retention and resolution entirely under your control.
If you need any of that, use the stack and don't look back.
The other trade
Kitaso is the opposite deal. You add a host and you see a chart. On each server there is at most a small scheduled collector writing metrics to a local SQLite file — no port, nothing new to secure. The Mac pulls everything over the SSH access that already exists. Alerts are thresholds set in a sheet, and they fire from the Mac while it is awake; the collector keeps the history overnight but does not page you. There is no PromQL, no shared web dashboard, no federation.
The stack is the right answer to a problem you may not have yet. Until you do, the first two servers are free at kitaso.app.
Builds Kitaso — a native Mac app for monitoring Linux servers over SSH. More posts →