Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Grafana Cloud Traces
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comGrafana Cloud Traces
grafana.comSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | Grafana Cloud Traces |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 3 |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 9.2 (#1) | 7.8 (#15) |
| Purpose | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. | Grafana Cloud Traces is a fully managed distributed tracing backend for searching traces, generating metrics from spans, and linking tracing data with logs and metrics. |
| Security and compliance | Grafana Cloud lists FedRAMP, NATSEC100, PCI DSS, A-LIGN, SOC Type II, and GDPR credentials or compliance claims. | Grafana Labs states that it is certified to ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 and maintains PCI compliance for its corporate environment. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
Grafana Cloud Traces
- FreeFree
- EnterprisePriced on request
- ProPrice not published
In their own words
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.
Grafana Cloud Traces
Grafana Cloud Traces has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.