DeepFlow vs groundcover

DeepFlow is an observability product for cloud infrastructure and cloud-native applications. It uses eBPF to collect application performance metrics, distributed traces, and continuous profiling data without intrusion. Its core capabilities include a universal service map, distributed tracing, and profiling. Built-in parsing covers HTTP, HTTPS, Dubbo, gRPC, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka, MQTT, and DNS. DeepFlow can serve as storage for Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, SkyWalking, and Pyroscope, and offers SQL, PromQL, and OTLP interfaces. AutoTagging links observability data with cloud and Kubernetes resources, tags, and CMDB business tags. The Community Edition is open source under Apache 2.0 and is listed at free. It supports Linux servers and selected Kubernetes, cloud, and container environments; deployment guidance covers Kubernetes and Docker Compose. Enterprise Edition adds encrypted agent-to-server transmission, multi-tenancy, and data permission isolation. The listed platforms include Android, API, Linux, self-hosted, web, and Windows.

groundcover is a cloud-native observability platform for monitoring production environments. Its eBPF sensor collects metrics, logs, and traces without code changes or manual instrumentation, processes data at the edge, and the product states that ingestion happens in real time without sampling. Bring Your Own Cloud deployment puts the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it and hosts the UI. Fully On-Prem deployment places both backend and UI on customer premises, including cloud or physical servers. Integrations include Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure, MongoDB Atlas, Redis Cloud, Datadog, and GitHub. Agent Mode can investigate telemetry and create dashboards, monitors, gcQL queries, and OTTL pipelines. The Free plan is free forever and includes 12-hour data retention and Slack Community support; paid plans start at $30 per host per month. Billing is based on average monthly monitored Kubernetes nodes or Linux hosts, not telemetry volume. The platform is available on Linux, self-hosted, and web.