Chronosphere Application Observability vs HostedMetrics

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.

HostedMetrics is a hosted and managed monitoring service for servers, applications, services, infrastructure, and IoT metrics. It is built around Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Grafana. Teams can create or import Grafana dashboards, inspect metrics, and configure alerts. InfluxDB accepts data through StatsD, MQTT, and AWS CloudWatch, while Prometheus supports scrape targets, remote write, PushGateway, and StatsD. Integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Docker, Nginx, GitHub, CircleCI, Collectd, Slack, Telegram, webhooks, PagerDuty, and VictorOps. Plans start at $79/mo (annual), and every plan includes a 14-day trial without a credit card. Startup provides 5,000 metrics or more, 10-second resolution, two-year retention, unlimited alerts, and four team members. Professional and Business increase allowances; Enterprise has custom pricing. Professional and Business include roles, access auditing, and SSO. Eligible paid customers receive a 99.9% availability commitment.