AWS X-Ray vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability
AWS X-Ray
aws.amazon.comGrafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | AWS X-Ray | Grafana Cloud Application Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.03/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 3 | 5 |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 9.0 (#2) | 9.2 (#1) |
| Documentation depth | The API reference was updated October 7, 2026 and documents trace-management and service-map operations. | The documentation covers setup, instrumentation, pricing, cost optimization, troubleshooting, APIs, SDKs, dashboards, integrations, and signal exploration. |
| Founded | 2006 | 2014 |
| Instrumentation options | Applications can send trace data to X-Ray using X-Ray SDKs, X-Ray APIs, AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, or CloudWatch Application Signals. | Supported approaches include Grafana Java and .NET distributions, upstream JavaScript/Python/PHP/Go SDKs, Beyla eBPF, and the OpenTelemetry Operator. |
| Purpose | AWS X-Ray collects data about application requests and provides tools to view, filter, and analyze it to identify issues and optimization opportunities. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.1 out of 5 from 16 reviews | 4.5 out of 5 from 209 reviews |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.3 out of 5 from 20 ratings | 4.6 out of 5 from 437 ratings |
| Rating on TrustRadius | 0 out of 10 from 0 reviews | 8.6 out of 10 from 173 reviews |
| Service map | X-Ray builds a map of clients, front-end services and backend services so users can spot bottlenecks and latency spikes. | A dynamic service map visualizes dependencies and activity paths between services. |
| What it does | AWS X-Ray collects request traces and lets teams inspect downstream AWS resources, microservices, databases and web APIs to find performance and error causes. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides managed application performance monitoring by combining OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry with Grafana Cloud insights. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
AWS X-Ray
AWS X-Ray is a cloud service for collecting and examining application request traces. A trace can show request and response details alongside calls to downstream AWS resources, microservices, databases and web APIs. X-Ray also uses trace data to map clients, front-end services and backend services, helping identify bottlenecks and latency spikes.
Applications can send traces through X-Ray SDKs or APIs, AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, or CloudWatch Application Signals. AWS integrations can add tracing headers, transmit data, run the daemon or instrument requests. For Lambda, the daemon can record invocation details, while the SDK can trace outgoing calls and add annotations and metadata. The SDK samples requests by default, with configurable sampling rules. Trace data is retained for 30 days and encrypted at rest; AWS Identity and Access Management controls access. X-Ray has a free allowance of 100,000 traces recorded and the first 1,000,000 traces retrieved or scanned per month; additional usage is billed by usage. Beginning February 25, 2026, AWS limits X-Ray SDK and daemon releases to security fixes and recommends migration to OpenTelemetry.
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
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.