DBmarlin vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability

DBmarlin monitors database performance and tracks changes to help teams identify where SQL execution time goes. It captures SQL statement text and wait states, and automatically detects changes to schema objects, database parameters and explain plans. Its AI Co-pilot provides database tuning insights and advice. DBmarlin is available self-hosted or in the cloud, with Linux, Windows and web platforms listed. The free Starter licence covers one database instance, unlimited users and no time limit. Premium is listed at £999/year per licence and includes priority support; monthly pricing is unavailable, and prices exclude tax. Supported databases include MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, CockroachDB, SAP HANA, SQL Server, IBM Db2, Oracle, SAP ASE, Informix, MongoDB and Snowflake. Listed integrations include Datadog, Grafana, Harness, Instana, Jenkins, Liquibase, New Relic and Splunk Observability Cloud. Licensing counts active instances, databases or nodes depending on the technology. SAP HANA pricing is marked beta, with pricing to be confirmed. The download page requests a first name, last name and work email to access downloads.

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.