Apache SkyWalking vs Sentry Performance

Apache SkyWalking is a free, self-hosted observability platform for cloud-native systems and AI workloads. It brings traces, metrics, logs, and profiling together to help users explore services, Kubernetes, and infrastructure through topology, telemetry, profiles, and alerts. For AI workloads, users can inspect model and MCP call latency and token rates, and review agent conversations, tool calls, and recorded file changes. The project lists agents for Java, Python, NodeJS, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Nginx LUA, Kong, and client-side JavaScript. Its integrations and ecosystem include OpenTelemetry OTLP, Istio, Envoy, Kubernetes, Grafana, and MCP. BanyanDB is described as a database for ingesting, analyzing, and storing observability data. Docker installation instructions cover Linux, macOS, WSL, and Windows PowerShell. Horizon UI supports SkyWalking natively since v11 and partially for v10. Its security documentation covers Content-Security-Policy, strict session cookies, no-store API responses, and optional login auditing. Apache source releases are official artifacts, with PGP or SHA512 verification recommended; the GraalVM distribution is marked experimental.

Sentry Performance is an application performance monitoring service for developers diagnosing bottlenecks in applications and distributed systems. It links performance problems with related errors, transactions, and code details to help teams assess user impact and investigate issues. Trace views and code context can help locate slow database queries, API calls, and associated code lines. Distributed tracing follows requests across services to help identify where latency or errors arise. Teams can prioritize performance issues by user impact and create custom metrics and alerts. Sentry lists integrations with GitHub, Jira, Slack, GitLab, Linear, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Datadog, and Vercel, and supports OpenTelemetry. Its cloud service is hosted on Google Cloud Platform with a multi-tenant architecture; a self-hosted option is available for teams that need data in their own infrastructure. Trace retention is 90 days. The Developer plan costs nothing and has monthly usage quotas. Paid plans start at $26/mo; a free trial is available for Business, but not Team. Sentry makes its SOC 2 Type 2 report and ISO 27001 certificate available through user accounts or by request.