async-profiler vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability

async-profiler is a free, self-hosted sampling profiler for Java designed to keep overhead low and avoid safepoint bias. It works with OpenJDK and other runtimes based on the HotSpot JVM, and stack traces can include non-Java threads as well as native and kernel frames. It profiles CPU time, Java-heap and native-memory allocations, memory leaks, contended locks, and hardware or software performance counters. Documented modes include CPU, allocation, wall-clock, Java-method, and multiple-events profiling. Results can be saved as collapsed stacks, flame graphs, HTML tree views, or text; an interactive Flame Graph can be viewed in a browser. Officially maintained builds are available for Linux and macOS on x64 and arm64. Developers can use the Java API as a Maven dependency, and IntelliJ IDEA includes async-profiler in its Java Profiler settings. It can profile Java processes in Docker or LXC from inside a container or from the host. Building it requires make, GCC 7.5.0 or later or Clang 7.0.0 or later, static libstdc++, and JDK 11 or later.

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.