Google Cloud Logging vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability
Google Cloud Logging
cloud.google.comGrafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | Google Cloud Logging | Grafana Cloud Application Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.01/mo | $0.03/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 13 | 5 |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.5 (#2) | 9.2 (#6) |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.3 (#2) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Spec score · Log Analysis Software | 9.2 (#2) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Official integrations include Cloud Monitoring, Error Reporting, Cloud Trace, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage and BigQuery. | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. |
| Pricing model | Google Cloud describes Logging charges as usage-based, with storage, vended-network-log and extended-retention meters. | 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 | Cloud Logging is a fully managed, real-time log management service for storage, search, analysis, and alerting at exabyte scale. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. |
| Rating on Apple App Store | 3.4 out of 5 from 101 ratings | 4.7 out of 5 from 60 ratings |
| Rating on G2 | 4.4 out of 5 from 37 reviews | 4.5 out of 5 from 209 reviews |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.0 out of 5 from 1 review | 4.6 out of 5 from 437 ratings |
| Rating on TrustRadius | Google Cloud Platform scores 9 out of 10 from 59 ratings | 8.6 out of 10 from 173 reviews |
| What it does | Cloud Logging is a fully managed service for storing, searching, analyzing, monitoring and alerting on log data at very large scale. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides managed application performance monitoring by combining OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry with Grafana Cloud insights. |
Plans
Google Cloud Logging
- Logging storage (non-vended network logs)$0.50 a month
- Vended network logs storage$0.25 a month
- Logging retention beyond default period$0.01 a month
- Free allotmentFree
- Log AnalyticsFree
- Log RouterFree
- Logs RouterFree
- Extended retention$0.01 a month
- Logging retention$0.01 a month
- Vended network logs storage$0.25, paid once
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Google Cloud Logging
Google Cloud Logging is a managed cloud service for storing, searching, analyzing and alerting on logs. Logs Explorer supports query-based searches, sorting, histogram views, field exploration and saved queries. Log Analytics uses BigQuery for SQL analysis, and log data can also be accessed in BigQuery alongside other business data. Google Cloud platform logs are ingested without setup; GKE workload logs are captured automatically, while the Ops Agent collects VM workload logs. Logs Router can send logs to external systems through Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage can hold archives. Regional log buckets keep and process workload data in a selected region, with configurable access controls and retention. The service integrates with Cloud Monitoring, Error Reporting and Cloud Trace. Cloud Audit Logs records administrative activity and resource access, and its entries are immutable; the product page states 400 days of audit-log retention at no additional cost. Standard logging storage includes the first 50 GiB per project per month free, and new Google Cloud customers are offered $300 in credits. The listed deployment is cloud; platforms include API, Linux and web.
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.