Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comNew Relic Kubernetes Monitoring
newrelic.comSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | $29.08/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 5 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Monitoring | 9.2 (#3) | 8.3 (#16) |
| Founded | 2014 | 2008 |
| Purpose | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. | The Kubernetes integration provides visibility into cluster health and workloads across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. |
| Security and compliance | Grafana Cloud lists FedRAMP, NATSEC100, PCI DSS, A-LIGN, SOC Type II, and GDPR credentials or compliance claims. | New Relic lists FedRAMP, HIPAA-enabled capabilities, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, PCI DSS, SOC 1, SOC 2, and TISAX among its current certifications or attestations, while noting individual services may not all be in scope. |
| Who it is for | Grafana describes the product as an application performance monitoring solution that helps software engineers detect anomalies, identify root causes, and fix problems. | The product is aimed at teams operating Kubernetes clusters who need to troubleshoot application and infrastructure behavior, including at scale. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring
- Pro$349 a year
- FreeFree
- EnterprisePriced on request
- ProPrice not published
- StandardPrice not published
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.
New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring
New Relic Kubernetes Monitoring provides visibility into cluster health and workloads across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Its cluster explorer brings together metrics, events, logs, and traces for control plane components, nodes, namespaces, deployments, replica sets, pods, and containers. The integration can forward Kubernetes logs and events for exploration, querying, and alerting, and uses service discovery to scrape Prometheus metrics. Teams can link application performance data with Kubernetes data to examine request rates, throughput, errors, and availability. Predefined and custom alert conditions are available, and reported data can trigger pod autoscaling. It can also monitor supported services including Apache, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, MongoDB, MySQL, NGINX, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, and Redis. Installation requires a New Relic license key and uses Helm or manifests. The perpetual free tier includes 100 GB of data ingest per month and one full platform user. The default configuration uses a privileged Infrastructure Agent sidecar for deep host metrics; unprivileged mode is available with reduced host visibility. The listed Pro plan costs $349 a year.