Self-hosted Grafana or managed Linux monitoring?

Self-hosting Grafana and the surrounding observability stack is a strong fit for teams that need deep platform control, custom data pipelines, custom dashboards, unusual retention policies, strict internal infrastructure rules, or broad telemetry beyond Linux host monitoring.

The tradeoff is ownership. Someone must run and upgrade the stack, manage Grafana organizations and roles, maintain collection configs, operate metrics and log storage, route tenant data, and respond when the monitoring system itself has problems.

Managed monitoring is a better fit when the first priority is reliable host visibility rather than building an observability platform. Nova handles the common platform work and keeps the V1 scope focused on Linux hosts, Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, and alerts.

That narrower scope is intentional. Nova is not the right answer if your immediate requirement is Windows monitoring, Kubernetes monitoring, traces, arbitrary Alloy pipelines, or fully custom Grafana environments.

Nova removes the setup and maintenance work around tenant creation, collector enrollment, remote configuration, Grafana organization mapping, OIDC role claims, Mimir and Loki routing, and baseline host dashboards.

For teams that simply need Linux hosts monitored quickly, that can be more valuable than owning every layer of the stack.