Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs pgwatch

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.

pgwatch is a free, open-source metrics collector and visualization solution for PostgreSQL databases. A remote daemon periodically connects to databases and reads PostgreSQL statistics using a normal database user, without special database rights or server-side extensions. Grafana presents the metrics and lets users add graphs; optional alerts can go through Mail, Slack, or PagerDuty. Metrics can be extended using pure SQL, and supported storage options include PostgreSQL, Prometheus, JSON File, and RPC. A built-in web interface manages databases and metric definitions and displays logs. pgwatch supports PostgreSQL 14 and newer, including single instances, high-availability clusters, pooled environments using PgBouncer or Pgpool II, and Patroni cluster managers. It is self-hosted, with a one-minute Docker installation described alongside custom installation options. The FAQ says it can be deployed fully on premises. Some operating-system metrics may be unavailable on cloud-managed PostgreSQL services because of platform restrictions.