Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Grafana k6

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 k6 is a Linux load-testing tool for load, stress, browser-based, distributed, and API testing. It also lists application tracing and network visibility, with OpenTelemetry support, service maps, and tail-based sampling. Logging features include pipelines, structured parsing, live tailing, and archive export; log retention is 30 days. Profiling covers CPU, memory, and threads, with both profiling modes available, while kernel profiling is not supported. The listed languages are C/C++, Go, Rust, Zig, Java,.NET, Python, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, and Perl. Deployment options include both models, and self-hosting is listed. The Free plan costs nothing and is limited to 500 virtual user hours per month. Pro costs $19 a month as a platform fee, then pay as you go; it lists 500 virtual user hours per month and 8×5 email support. Pro usage offers automatic volume discounts. Enterprise lists one million concurrent virtual users and a $25,000 minimum annual commit. A 14-day trial is listed.