Amazon CodeGuru Profiler vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability

Amazon CodeGuru Profiler collects runtime performance data from live applications and recommends ways to improve performance and find CPU bottlenecks. It is designed for continuous profiling of production applications with minimal overhead. Interactive flame graphs show CPU and latency analysis, including which code paths use the most resources. Machine learning recommendations identify expensive methods and explain their cause, impact, and possible resolution.

The service can detect anomalies in application profiles and, when configured, send an Amazon SNS notification for a new anomaly. It supports Java, JVM languages such as Scala and Kotlin, and Python 3.6 or later. Java and other JVM languages can be profiled for CPU and heap summary; Python profiling covers CPU wall-clock time. Applications may run on EC2, ECS, EKS, Fargate, Lambda, or on premises. The agent can be enabled in JVM applications from the command line or application code and is also used for Lambda applications. An AWS account is required, with IAM permissions controlling access. The agent collects stack traces, not parameter names or values, variable values, or application data.

Grafana Cloud Application Observability monitors applications and brings OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data together to help software engineers investigate anomalies and their causes. Its knowledge graph discovers services and relationships from telemetry, while the service catalog displays latency, error ratio, and request rate for each service. The RCA workbench and Entity Graph help investigate correlated problems across a stack. Metrics, logs, traces, and profiles share a unified view, with drill-down from a service into its signals. Grafana identifies Alloy as a collector with native pipelines for OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. The free plan includes up to 2,232 host hours per month and community support. Pro is listed at $0.03 a month, with a $19 monthly platform fee and $0.025 per host hour; host hours and application telemetry are billed at standard Grafana Cloud rates. Serverless usage is billed on telemetry ingested instead of host hours. The cloud service runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and the web.