Comparison · vs Percona PMM
The Percona PMM alternative for teams done babysitting Grafana.
PMM is honest open source and we respect it. But running PMM at fleet scale means a Grafana you tune, exporters you tune, and a Postgres-cluster-for-monitoring you tune. Some teams want to ship product instead.
01. Why teams move
What teams say in the first call.
- PMM is operationally heavy — Grafana, VictoriaMetrics, ClickHouse, exporters, all yours to babysit.
- Out-of-the-box dashboards are general — most teams end up forking and customizing.
- Anomaly detection and forecasting are not first-class.
- Multi-tenant / multi-team is bolted on.
- Paid Percona support is excellent but doesn't change the operational lift.
02. Honest take
What Percona PMM is genuinely good at.
We’re not interested in trash-talk. Here’s where Percona PMM is the right call — useful even if you end up choosing Obsfly, because keeping Percona PMM for some workloads can make sense.
- + Truly open source — Apache 2.0, no rug pulls.
- + Postgres + MySQL depth — Percona's bread and butter, deeply optimized.
- + Active community, frequent releases, real customer feedback loop.
- + PMM Server runs offline; great for air-gapped environments without licensing.
03. Side by side
Obsfly vs Percona PMM, line by line.
04. The math
Pricing snapshot.
Public list pricing where known; “contact sales” where not. Real bills are usually within 20% of these figures.
05. Switching
How teams actually switch.
Keep PMM as backup
Some teams keep PMM for its raw exporters and use Obsfly for the operational UI. PMM agents + Obsfly agent don't conflict.
Same Postgres / MySQL surfaces
Both built on pg_stat_statements / Performance Schema. Migration of dashboards is mostly mechanical.
Talk to us about Sovereign
If your move was to PMM specifically for air-gap, our Sovereign tier exists exactly for that — single Helm chart, license-controlled, no phone-home in air-gapped mode.
06. FAQ
Common questions.
We're committed to open source. Is Obsfly right for us?+
Honest answer: maybe not. Our agent + receiver are source-available (BSL → Apache 2.0 after 4 years), but the control plane is commercial. If 'truly Apache' is a hard requirement, PMM stays the right call.
Will Obsfly scrape my existing PMM exporters?+
We scrape the underlying DBs directly, not via PMM exporters. You can run both — they don't conflict.
PMM Server vs Obsfly Sovereign — what's different?+
Both run fully self-hosted. Sovereign ships as one Helm chart with managed upgrades and an annual license. PMM is community-supported with optional Percona support contracts. Choose based on whether you want license-paid or community-paid support.
Where it shows up
Obsfly for the databases you run.
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Deep dives
Reading you might want before the call.
Postgres
pg_stat_statements: the complete 2026 guide
Every column, every gotcha, the queries you should run today, and why pg_stat_statements is still the most useful 80 lines of telemetry in Postgres — even with five new alternatives in 2026.
MySQL
MySQL Performance Schema vs sys schema: a 2026 monitoring guide
Performance Schema is unreadable. sys schema is friendly but lossy. Here's exactly which to use for which production question, with the eight queries every MySQL DBA should know by heart.
BYOC
Why regulated SaaS can't use Datadog DBM — and the BYOC fix
Walking through the architecture of a BYOC observability deployment: where data lives, what crosses the boundary, and how to satisfy SOC2 / HIPAA / GDPR without giving up the UX.
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See it on your stack.
20-min comparison demo. Bring real queries from your Percona PMM setup; we'll reproduce them in Obsfly live.