Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs ilert

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.

ilert combines alerting, on-call management, incident response, and status pages in one incident management platform. Responders can receive push, SMS, voice-call, and messenger alerts, then acknowledge them with one click without logging in. Teams can build follow-the-sun rotations, swap shifts, and manage overrides from the mobile app. Incident tools include severity settings, parallel escalations, and incident commander assignment. Status pages can be public, private, or tailored to an audience. AI SRE examines logs, metrics, traces, and change data to provide a root-cause hypothesis, supporting evidence, and a proposed action for human review. Integrations cover monitoring, ticketing, chat, and collaboration tools, alongside Email, SMS, Heartbeat monitoring, and a custom Event API. ilert is available on Android, iOS, web, and through an API. The Free plan is free for up to five users and one status page, with 100 SMS/voice notifications monthly; that quota is a hard limit, and notifications stop until reset unless the account moves to a paid plan.