Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Sentry Continuous Profiling

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.

Sentry Continuous Profiling helps teams locate backend performance bottlenecks in Node.js and Python code, down to functions and lines. Continuous profiles can run for unlimited durations. An Aggregate Flamegraph summarizes project performance without requiring a single transaction as its scope. Developers can control profiling manually with SDK APIs or configure it to follow a trace lifecycle, starting when a root span is active. UI Profiling covers iOS, macOS and Android, with browser JavaScript and Electron also listed. Sentry says profiling requires performance monitoring to be enabled in the app, and availability for continuous profiling depends on the SDK. Continuous and UI Profiling use separate profile-hour billing measures and are available through pay-as-you-go usage. Sentry lists a free plan and paid pricing from $26/mo. Its integrations include GitHub, Jira, Slack, GitLab, Linear, Microsoft Teams and PagerDuty. Sentry says its service is hosted on Google Cloud Platform and has SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 certification and a HIPAA attestation.