Chronosphere Application Observability vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability
Chronosphere Application Observability
chronosphere.ioGrafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | Chronosphere Application Observability | Grafana Cloud Application Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $0.03/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 5 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 9.0 (#2) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Spec score · Observability Platforms | 9.0 (#2) | 9.2 (#1) |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Monitoring | 9.0 (#4) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Spec score · Metrics Monitoring Tools | 9.0 (#4) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Spec score · Cloud Monitoring | 8.9 (#5) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Documentation depth | Chronosphere documentation covers trace ingestion, querying, dashboards, alerts, linking, analysis and control workflows. | The documentation covers setup, instrumentation, pricing, cost optimization, troubleshooting, APIs, SDKs, dashboards, integrations, and signal exploration. |
| Founded | 2019 | 2014 |
| Pricing model | The observability platform charges mainly for data retained rather than hosts or virtual machines; Telemetry Pipeline pricing is based on throughput. | New customers from February 13, 2026 pay $0.025 per host hour plus $0.50 per 1,000 active metric series and $0.50 per GB for traces, logs, and profiles. |
| Purpose | Chronosphere provides observability for cloud-native applications and microservices to help teams detect and resolve issues. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.6 out of 5 from 97 ratings | 4.6 out of 5 from 437 ratings |
| Service discovery | Automatic discovery maps APIs, dependencies and microservices and combines custom telemetry with RED metrics. | The knowledge graph automatically discovers services and their relationships from telemetry. |
| What it does | Chronosphere provides cloud-native application observability for collecting, correlating and analyzing metrics, logs, traces and events. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides managed application performance monitoring by combining OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry with Grafana Cloud insights. |
Plans
Chronosphere Application Observability
- Chronosphere pilotFree
- PilotFree
- Chronosphere Observability PlatformPriced on request
- Custom enterprise subscriptionPriced on request
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Chronosphere Application Observability
Chronosphere Application Observability is a cloud service for helping teams find and resolve problems in cloud-native applications and microservices. Chronosphere Lens creates service views aligned with an application’s architecture. Teams can use RED metrics and service-level objectives to understand performance and service dependencies, while metrics, logs, traces, and events are correlated with system changes and their effects. Distributed tracing maps request paths across components to help locate latency and inter-service communication issues. Dynamic trace sampling is offered to balance observability insight with cost. The service accepts open telemetry formats including Prometheus and OpenTelemetry. Listed alerting connections include Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps, email, and a general-purpose webhook. Pricing for the Observability Platform is based on useful data retained and customized for each organization; no price is listed. Pilots are typically free and average 2–3 weeks, though large-scale or long-term pilots may be paid. A free trial is offered, but there is no free plan. Customer support includes year-round, 24/7 communication through Slack, Zendesk, or email, with optional office hours and calls.
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.