Google Cloud Trace vs Grafana Cloud Application Observability
Google Cloud Trace
cloud.google.comGrafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | Google Cloud Trace | Grafana Cloud Application Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.20/mo | $0.03/mo |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 5 |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 7.8 (#14) | 9.2 (#1) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 7.6 (#30) | 9.2 (#3) |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 7.7 (#25) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Integrations | Cloud Logging entries can be associated with traces and spans, and displayed alongside trace waterfall graphs or in Logs Explorer. | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. |
| Purpose | Cloud Trace collects latency data to help troubleshoot performance bottlenecks across services and generative AI applications. | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. |
Plans
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 Trace
Google Cloud Trace has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
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.