Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs HostedMetrics

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.

HostedMetrics is a hosted and managed monitoring service for servers, applications, services, infrastructure, and IoT metrics. It is built around Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Grafana. Teams can create or import Grafana dashboards, inspect metrics, and configure alerts. InfluxDB accepts data through StatsD, MQTT, and AWS CloudWatch, while Prometheus supports scrape targets, remote write, PushGateway, and StatsD. Integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Docker, Nginx, GitHub, CircleCI, Collectd, Slack, Telegram, webhooks, PagerDuty, and VictorOps. Plans start at $79/mo (annual), and every plan includes a 14-day trial without a credit card. Startup provides 5,000 metrics or more, 10-second resolution, two-year retention, unlimited alerts, and four team members. Professional and Business increase allowances; Enterprise has custom pricing. Professional and Business include roles, access auditing, and SSO. Eligible paid customers receive a 99.9% availability commitment.