# Cronitor MCP server vs Grafana MCP Server

> Grafana scores 71 (BB) to Cronitor's 59.1 (C) for incidents. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cronitor-mcp-vs-grafana-mcp-server
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cronitor-mcp-vs-grafana-mcp-server.md (~4,200 tokens)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (the key docs and every listing in one file, at most 16 MB, about 4 million tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (the whole catalogue as tools, no key)
- DNS: dig +short TXT <slug>.grade.anchorterminal.com (the grade as a DNS TXT record, for a sandbox with no HTTP where names still resolve; also top., best.<category>. and <a>.vs.<b>. under the zone, and the same under grade.letme.dev)
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)
- Updated: 2026-11-07

Grafana MCP Server scores 71 (BB) on agent readiness against Cronitor MCP server's 59.1 (C), and leads in every scored category. Both do incidents.

- Cronitor MCP server: grade C, 59.1/100, rank #718 of 1510. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/cronitor-mcp.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/cronitor-mcp.json
- Grafana MCP Server: grade BB, 71/100, rank #172 of 1510. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/grafana-mcp-server.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/grafana-mcp-server.json
- Best observability and incident tools for AI agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/best/observability/index.md
- All 59 observability comparisons: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/observability/index.md

## Which one, for what

### Cronitor MCP server (C)

Good for: Teams who monitor cron jobs, heartbeats and sites with Cronitor and want an agent to set up and triage monitoring.

Also in its favour:
- A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
- No incidents deducted, where Grafana MCP Server loses 7 points for them

Watch for: 71 tools, a heavy context load

### Grafana MCP Server (BB)

Good for: Teams on Grafana, self-managed or Cloud, that want an agent to read dashboards and query Prometheus, Loki, Tempo and Pyroscope, and to work with alert rules, incidents and OnCall.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 91 against 55
- Security & auth, 67 against 58
- Payments & pricing, 60 against 40
- Maintenance & community, 96 against 55
- Transparency & trust, 80 against 37

Also in its favour:
- Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
- Runs on your own machine
- Open source

Watch for: The default set is 79 tools, and 119 with every category on, counted from the registration code in source


## Why the edge

### Transparency & trust: Grafana MCP Server +43

- Cronitor MCP server (37): robots.txt disallows the terms and privacy pages, so neither was read (5 of 30, terms exist but weren't readable). Data handling only from the security page (encryption, backups) (10 of 30). No deprecation policy found; the docs version the error codes by protocol revision (5 of 20). Subprocessors not found (5 of 20). 5 + 10 + 5 + 5 = 25.
- Grafana MCP Server (80): Apache-2.0 (30). Local software that talks to the configured Grafana. A docs page lists every field in the usage report, the destination, and the region and network name the receiving service adds, and the Grafana Labs privacy policy (last updated 10 July 2026) covers usage statistics from its open-source software. No retention period for the reports was found (24 of 30). No deprecation policy. Notices come without dates, such as `GRAFANA_API_KEY` to be removed 'in a future version', and the Sift tools were marked deprecated before 2.0.0 removed them (10 of 20). Usage statistics are documented with three opt-outs and a `log` mode that prints the report without sending it. They arrived off by default in 1.5.0 on 17 September 2026 and were switched on by default in 2.0.0, noted in the changelog (17 of 20).

### Maintenance & community: Grafana MCP Server +41

- Cronitor MCP server (55): Registry entry io.cronitor/cronitor updated 3 November 2026 (30). No dated changelog found to count (0). Support page and docs; no public changelog (10 of 15). Official registry entry under its own namespace, and official SDKs (15). No package to read (0). 30 + 0 + 10 + 15 + 0 = 55. Registry presence read from Anchor Terminal's own daily import of the official MCP registry (/api/v1/registry.json, 6 November 2026), not the registry's API.
- Grafana MCP Server (96): v2.1.1 tagged on 20 October 2026, 12 days before the check, after v2.1.0 the same day, with commits on main to 31 October (30). 17 tagged releases from 1.1.0 on 10 August to 2.1.1 in the 90 days to 1 November (20). Per the 8 October check, not re-read on 1 November, 38 issues closed in the 30 days before that check against 54 open and 22 open pull requests, and several feature requests from March and April without a reply (21 of 25). Listed in the official MCP registry as `io.github.grafana/mcp-grafana`, a GitHub-verified namespace, with v2.1.1 published on 20 October and marked latest (15). Renovate, a Docker image scan workflow, cosign signing with SPDX SBOMs for releases from 2.1.0, and Go toolchain and dependency bumps for CVEs on 21 and 28 October (10).

### Reliability: Grafana MCP Server +36

- Cronitor MCP server (55): Status page at status.cronitor.io with components for the APIs and telemetry regions (20). No history was readable (history.rss 404, uptime 'No data available') (5). Rate limits are returned with limit and window in the error data, but no numbers are published (5 of 15). Rate-limit errors carry retry_after_seconds, bulk deletes validate every key first, and the docs say which repeated calls are safe (15). No SLA found (0). Not labelled beta (10). 20 + 5 + 5 + 15 + 0 + 10 = 55.
- Grafana MCP Server (91): Scored as local software, since the owner runs it over stdio, SSE or streamable HTTP. Official PyPI package `mcp-grafana` (a wheel that carries the Go binary, Python 3.10 or later), a Docker image, release binaries and a Helm chart, with Grafana 9.0 or later stated as the requirement (20). Unit, integration and end-to-end workflows all concluded in success on main on 8 October 2026, per the 8 October check, not re-read on 1 November (25). Per the 8 October check, not re-read on 1 November, 54 open issues, none labelled bug, and 38 closed in the 30 days before that check. Three bug reports remained open from July and August (#992 `run_panel_query` 422, #1005 `grafana_api_request` 500 on plugin resources, #1049 a dropped table row in `get_panel_image`), each with replies. A stale issue and pull request workflow was added on 27 October (19 of 25). The changelog follows Keep a Changelog and semantic versioning and labels breaking changes, and 1.6.2 announced that 2.0 came next. Patch release 1.4.1 carried a breaking parameter change on the Sift tools, 2.0.0 followed 1.0.0 by two months, and minor release 2.1.0 on 20 October changed the output of `list_users_by_org`, labelled on the day (12 of 15). Version 2.1.1, the latest release on 1 November (15).

### Payments & pricing: Grafana MCP Server +20

- Cronitor MCP server (40): No machine payment protocol (0). Per-monitor and per-user prices public (20). Free plan for 5 monitors, no card mentioned (20). A person signs up or signs in through a browser (0). 0 + 20 + 20 + 0 = 40.
- Grafana MCP Server (60): Read with the self-hosted rule. The server is free under Apache-2.0 and needs no signup of its own, so 20 + 20 + 20. No x402, MPP or L402 (0). It needs a Grafana instance, which can be the free open-source Grafana. Grafana Cloud prices were not checked. The separate hosted Grafana Cloud MCP server counts towards Grafana Assistant usage and is not what this listing grades.

### Security & auth: Grafana MCP Server +9

- Cronitor MCP server (58): OAuth bounded by role with no scope choice, or scoped API keys (22 of 30). Read-only users get only read tools; write tools follow the role (14 of 20). The docs warn that event messages, command output and request bodies can hold customer data or secrets, and tell the agent to ask before expanding them; secrets are redacted (12 of 15). No audit log of MCP calls found (0). The security page covers encryption and relies on AWS's certifications; no security.txt (404) and no disclosure policy found (10 of 20). 22 + 14 + 12 + 0 + 10 = 58.
- Grafana MCP Server (67): The server holds a Grafana service account token, which Grafana RBAC can scope by action and resource and which can be revoked. `GRAFANA_SERVICE_ACCOUNT_TOKEN_FILE` is re-read on each request for rotation. Username and password and a deprecated API key also work. The open-source server has no OAuth, and no secret travels in a URL (25 of 30). `--disable-write`, `--disable-query`, per-category flags, Loki enforced matchers and a per-tool RBAC table support least privilege. Writes are on by default, the default set includes `grafana_api_request` for any API path, and nothing asks for confirmation (14 of 20). Log lines, dashboards and annotations reach the model as stored. No injection guidance was found in the README or docs, and issue #680 on the subject has been open since 24 March 2026 (2 of 15). OpenTelemetry traces, metrics and logs per tool call and slow-request logging, with arguments left out of spans unless `--include-args-in-spans` is set (10 of 15). Grafana Labs runs a disclosure programme on Intigriti without bounties, lists ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2, and publishes advisories on grafana.com, two of them for this server (CVE-2026-15583 on 15 July and CVE-2026-19516 on 11 August 2026). The repository has no SECURITY.md and grafana.com has no security.txt (16 of 20).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Cronitor MCP server | Grafana MCP Server | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 55 | 91 | Grafana MCP Server +36 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 80 | 81 | Grafana MCP Server +1 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 73 | 74 | Grafana MCP Server +1 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 58 | 67 | Grafana MCP Server +9 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 40 | 60 | Grafana MCP Server +20 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 55 | 96 | Grafana MCP Server +41 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 37 | 80 | Grafana MCP Server +43 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -7 | |
| **Total** | | **59.1 · C** | **71 · BB** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Cronitor MCP server | Grafana MCP Server |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | MCP server | MCP server |
| Vendor | Cronitor | Grafana Labs |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://cronitor.io/mcp` | no (local only) |
| Transports | Streamable HTTP | stdio, SSE (legacy), Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | none | Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | 71 | 119 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | `io.cronitor/cronitor` | `io.github.grafana/mcp-grafana` |
| Last release | none | 2026-10-20 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | 2026-07-10 |
| Popularity | none | 3.5k stars, 152k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3/5 (4) |

## How the scores have moved

### Cronitor MCP server

No score change since it was listed.

### Grafana MCP Server

- -3.0 on 1 November 2026: negative event
- +0.1 on 28 October 2026: checklist
- -0.6 on 17 October 2026: product, new evidence, negative event

## Verdicts

**Cronitor MCP server.** Cronitor's MCP server is one of the most carefully documented we've read, with strict input schemas, summary modes, typed error codes and clear advice on secrets in monitor output. It has 71 tools, publishes no changelog, and its terms and privacy pages are closed to crawlers, so data handling couldn't be checked.

**Grafana MCP Server.** Every default tool declares typed inputs and read-only and destructive annotations in source, and `--disable-write` cuts the default 79 tools to 62. Writes and a general `grafana_api_request` tool are on by default, the default list is long at 79 tools, and two `X-Grafana-URL` flaws, one rated critical, were fixed in July and August 2026.

## Before you call either

### Cronitor MCP server

1. Start with list_monitors and list_issues in summary mode
2. Ask the user before expanding event messages, command output or request bodies
3. On a rate-limit error, wait retry_after_seconds
4. Over the plan's monitor limit, new monitors are saved but disabled

### Grafana MCP Server

1. Start with `--disable-write` unless the task needs writes, and add `--disable-api` to remove `grafana_api_request`
2. Pass `--enabled-tools` with only the categories needed. The default list loads 79 tools
3. Use `get_dashboard_summary` or `get_dashboard_property` with a JSONPath before `get_dashboard_by_uid`, which returns the whole dashboard JSON
4. Set `GRAFANA_USAGE_STATS=disabled` or `DO_NOT_TRACK=1` to stop the four-hourly usage report to stats.grafana.org
5. Use streamable HTTP, not SSE, when each caller needs its own token or organisation, and set `--server-auth-token` on any non-loopback address

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, Cronitor MCP server or Grafana MCP Server?

Grafana MCP Server scores 71 (BB) on agent readiness against Cronitor MCP server's 59.1 (C), and leads in every scored category.

### Do Cronitor MCP server and Grafana MCP Server need an API key?

Cronitor MCP server uses an OAuth sign-in. Grafana MCP Server takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

### Can an agent call Cronitor MCP server and Grafana MCP Server without installing anything?

Cronitor MCP server has a hosted endpoint at https://cronitor.io/mcp. Grafana MCP Server runs on your own machine, with no hosted endpoint listed.

### Are Cronitor MCP server and Grafana MCP Server open source?

No open-source release is listed for Cronitor MCP server. Grafana MCP Server is open source (Apache-2.0).


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cronitor-mcp-vs-grafana-mcp-server.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cronitor-mcp-vs-grafana-mcp-server.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "cronitor-mcp", "b": "grafana-mcp-server"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare cronitor-mcp grafana-mcp-server`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/cronitor-mcp.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/grafana-mcp-server.json

## Other comparisons with Cronitor MCP server or Grafana MCP Server

- [Axiom MCP Server vs Cronitor MCP server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/axiom-vs-cronitor-mcp.md)
- [Better Stack vs Cronitor MCP server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/better-stack-vs-cronitor-mcp.md)
- [Causely MCP server vs Cronitor MCP server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/causely-vs-cronitor-mcp.md)
- [Causely MCP server vs Grafana MCP Server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/causely-vs-grafana-mcp-server.md)
- [Cronitor MCP server vs Datadog MCP Server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cronitor-mcp-vs-datadog-mcp.md)
- [Cronitor MCP server vs incident.io API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cronitor-mcp-vs-incident-io.md)
- [Cronitor MCP server vs New Relic MCP Server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cronitor-mcp-vs-new-relic.md)
- [Cronitor MCP server vs PagerDuty MCP Server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cronitor-mcp-vs-pagerduty-mcp.md)
- [Cronitor MCP server vs Rootly MCP Server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cronitor-mcp-vs-rootly-mcp.md)
- [Grafana MCP Server vs incident.io API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/grafana-mcp-server-vs-incident-io.md)
- [Grafana MCP Server vs PagerDuty MCP Server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/grafana-mcp-server-vs-pagerduty-mcp.md)
- [Grafana MCP Server vs Rootly MCP Server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/grafana-mcp-server-vs-rootly-mcp.md)
- [Axiom MCP Server vs Grafana MCP Server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/axiom-vs-grafana-mcp-server.md)
- [Better Stack vs Grafana MCP Server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/better-stack-vs-grafana-mcp-server.md)
- [Cronitor MCP server vs Honeycomb MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cronitor-mcp-vs-honeycomb-mcp.md)
- [Datadog MCP Server vs Grafana MCP Server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/datadog-mcp-vs-grafana-mcp-server.md)
- [Grafana MCP Server vs Honeycomb MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/grafana-mcp-server-vs-honeycomb-mcp.md)
- [Grafana MCP Server vs New Relic MCP Server](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/grafana-mcp-server-vs-new-relic.md)
- [Grafana MCP Server vs Sentry MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/grafana-mcp-server-vs-sentry-mcp.md)

---

Query this catalogue directly over MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP, no key). How: https://www.anchorterminal.com/agents/#mcp