Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Logstash
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comLogstash
elastic.coSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | Logstash |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 1 |
| Spec score · Log Management Software | 9.2 (#6) | 8.5 (#25) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. | Elastic describes turn-key integrations for connecting data sources and ingesting logs, metrics, traces, files, web content, and security events. |
| Purpose | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. | Logstash is an open source server-side data processing pipeline that ingests data from multiple sources, transforms it, and sends it to a destination. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
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.
Logstash
Logstash is an open-source, server-side pipeline that collects data from many sources, transforms events, and sends results to destinations. It can continuously ingest logs, metrics, web application data, data-store information, and AWS service data. Filters parse events, identify fields, and transform content with features such as grok parsing, IP geolocation, and anonymizing or excluding sensitive fields. Data can go to multiple outputs, including Elasticsearch. Its plugin framework includes more than 200 input, filter, and output plugins, and custom plugins can be built with an API and generator. Persistent queues provide at-least-once delivery for in-flight events after node failures; dead letter queues retain events for inspection and replay. Monitoring tools show pipeline performance and availability. Logstash supports log pipelines, archive export, live tailing, and structured parsing. It is self-hosted, with Linux packages and Docker listed. The free plan is free under the Elastic License.