Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs OpenTelemetry Collector
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comOpenTelemetry Collector
opentelemetry.ioSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | OpenTelemetry Collector |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 0 |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 9.2 (#3) | 6.9 (#44) |
| Integrations | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. | The docs list support for open source telemetry formats including Jaeger, Prometheus, and Fluent Bit, with data sent to open source or commercial backends. |
| Purpose | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. | OpenTelemetry Collector receives, processes, and exports telemetry data in a vendor-agnostic way. |
| 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 Collector is recommended alongside services to handle tasks such as retries, batching, encryption, and filtering sensitive data before export. |
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.
OpenTelemetry Collector
OpenTelemetry Collector has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.