Best Open Source Database Monitoring Tools

"Open source" here means the code you run is under an OSI-style open source licence (Apache 2.0, MIT, BSD, GPL, AGPL or the PostgreSQL Licence). We excluded tools whose core is source-available or whose interface is closed. Licence still matters in practice: AGPLv3 (Grafana, Zabbix, PMM Server) requires you to publish changes if you modify the software and offer it to others over a network, which rarely affects internal monitoring but matters if you build a product on it.

Every tool on this page reads the database's own statistics. For PostgreSQL, that is mostly pg_stat_statements (loaded through shared_preload_libraries and created with CREATE EXTENSION) and the pg_stat_* views; for MySQL, Performance Schema and the sys schema; for SQL Server, DMVs and Query Store. The query below (PostgreSQL 14 and later) is the core of what query-level tools show:

-- PostgreSQL: top statements by total execution time
SELECT query,
       calls,
       total_exec_time,
       mean_exec_time,
       rows
FROM pg_stat_statements
ORDER BY total_exec_time DESC
LIMIT 10;

For commercial and SaaS options alongside these, see the best database monitoring tools.

Quick picks

How we chose

We considered Prometheus with the community exporters, Grafana, Percona Monitoring and Management, Zabbix, pgwatch, pgBadger and Netdata. To be listed, the project had to be actively released in 2026, publish a clear open source licence in its repository or on its site, and be usable to monitor at least one of SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL or MongoDB.

Netdata is not an entry: its Agent is GPLv3+, but Netdata states that its dashboard UI is closed source (free to use). pgAdmin's dashboards are covered in pgAdmin vs pgBadger. Commercial tools with open source collectors, such as pganalyze, are in the hub guide.

For each project we recorded the licence, the components you must run, where data is stored, what it collects and its main trade-off. The order is not a ranking.

At a glance

How to choose, and what it costs to run

Choose by engine and by what you already operate. MySQL, PostgreSQL or MongoDB and nothing else in place: PMM. A Prometheus and Grafana platform already running: add exporters. Zabbix already watching servers: use its database templates, especially for SQL Server, where open source query-level options are thin. PostgreSQL only: pgwatch for continuous metrics and pgBadger for log reports, which work well together.

Budget for the work as well as the hardware: a server or cluster for collection and storage, disk sized for your retention, backups of the monitoring data, a least-privilege monitoring login on every database, upgrades for each component, and time to tune dashboards and alerts. If that adds up to more than a licence, a commercial or cloud-native tool from the hub guide may cost less overall.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Prometheus repository (Apache 2.0)
• Prometheus storage documentation
• postgres_exporter (prometheus-community)
• mysqld_exporter
• sql_exporter (MIT)
• Grafana Alloy prometheus.exporter.mssql
• Grafana repository (AGPL-3.0)
• Grafana configuration (database section)
• Percona PMM repository and licences
• Percona PMM releases
• Zabbix licence
• Zabbix requirements
• Zabbix SQL Server integration
• pgwatch repository
• pgBadger repository
• Netdata repository (licensing)
• pg_stat_statements (PostgreSQL documentation)

Checked October 2026.

How we research these guides: our editorial method.