Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Mackerel

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.

Mackerel is a cloud-based SaaS service for monitoring servers and team-managed infrastructure. Installing its agent starts monitoring, after which hosts can be grouped into services and roles. It visualizes host metrics and user-defined service measures, including response time, sales and page views. Monitoring features include combining metrics, tracking predicted values and machine-learning anomaly detection. Cloud integrations cover Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud; a container agent treats Amazon ECS tasks and Kubernetes pods as hosts. Users can extend monitoring with open-source plugins, APIs and the mkr command-line tool. Customer Reliability Engineers can offer technical guidance on implementation and use, while standard-plan technical support is email-only. The free plan has five standard and micro hosts total, 500 metrics, one-day retention, 10 monitoring rules, one dashboard and up to 5M trace spans. A two-week trial includes Standard-plan functions and a 100M-span allowance. Standard host usage costs 2,180 yen, tax included, per host month.