Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Prometheus
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.com
Prometheus
prometheus.ioSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | Prometheus |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 1 |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 9.2 (#3) | 7.6 (#31) |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Monitoring | 9.2 (#3) | 7.7 (#32) |
| Spec score · Monitoring Observability | 9.2 (#2) | 7.7 (#17) |
| Spec score · Metrics Monitoring Tools | 9.2 (#3) | 7.7 (#21) |
| Spec score · IT Alerting Software | 9.2 (#2) | 7.7 (#17) |
| Spec score · Cloud Monitoring | 9.2 (#3) | 7.6 (#15) |
| Founded | 2014 | 2012 |
| Integrations | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. | The ecosystem includes client libraries, exporters, Pushgateway, and Alertmanager; integrations also include Grafana for visualization and webhook-based alert notifications. |
| What it does | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides managed application performance monitoring by combining OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry with Grafana Cloud insights. | Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit that collects and stores metrics as time series. |
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.
Prometheus
Prometheus is a free, open-source toolkit for systems monitoring and alerting that collects metrics as time series. Each series is identified by a metric name and key-value labels, and PromQL is used to query the data. Prometheus typically gathers metrics by pulling over HTTP; it can also receive pushed data through an intermediary gateway. Targets can be found with service discovery or configured statically. The main server runs as a standalone monolithic binary without external dependencies, and official components are available as precompiled binaries and Docker images. Its ecosystem includes client libraries, exporters, Pushgateway and Alertmanager, with Grafana for visualization and webhooks for alert notifications. Prometheus and most exporters support TLS, client certificate authentication and HTTP Basic Authentication. The project advises against exposing component HTTP endpoints to public networks without protective measures. Servers do not depend on network storage or remote services, which the project says can help during outages. Prometheus is not recommended for uses requiring 100% accurate data, such as per-request billing.