Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Maple

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.

Maple is an OpenTelemetry observability platform for distributed systems. It ingests traces, logs, and metrics and stores them in ClickHouse. Teams can inspect request spans, relate traces to logs and service data, search structured logs by severity, service, or attribute, and open a trace from a log. Metric tools include exploration, dashboards, service maps, and alerting. Browser session replay records clicks, routes, console lines, and failed requests, linking sessions to traces with a shared ID. Alerts can route to Slack, PagerDuty, Discord, Telegram, email, webhooks, and Hazel. A hosted MCP server and documented REST API support automation for telemetry search, error triage, dashboards, and alert rules. Maple offers cloud, self-hosted, and local options; Maple Local runs ingestion, an embedded database, query API, and dashboard in one binary without an account or cloud service. Self-hosted source is FSL-1.1 and converts to Apache 2.0 after two years. Startup costs $39 per month and includes 30-day retention. Maple Cloud offers US and EU regions, but the selected region cannot later be changed.