Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Robusta

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.

Robusta is an AI SRE offered through SaaS, a customer VPC deployment, or full self-hosting with the customer’s own LLM key. It learns an environment, groups duplicate alerts, filters noise, and surfaces new issues. When an alert arrives, its AI investigates root cause and blast radius, proposes a fix, and escalates to a human when needed. Alerts can enter through webhooks, HTTP requests, or MCP events, with listed tools including Prometheus AlertManager, Grafana, Datadog, PagerDuty, and Jira. Holmes provides native integrations for Kubernetes, OpenShift, AWS, Azure, GCP, Prometheus, Grafana, PostgreSQL, GitHub, and ServiceNow. Other sources can connect through MCP servers or HTTP APIs, including generated HTTP connectors. Customers may use their own models and API keys and disable Robusta-hosted models. The agent is read-only by default; write access for auto-remediation is optional. Queries, log lines, and conclusions are logged and replayable. Robusta says customer data is not used for model training and that it is SOC 2 compliant. Pricing is on request.