Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Skylight

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.

Skylight is a cloud profiler for Ruby and Rails applications, available through API, Linux, macOS, and web platforms. It ranks endpoints by “agony,” combining popularity with response time, and plots deployments against performance so teams can relate code changes to results. Supported Ruby frameworks include Rails, Sinatra, and Grape. Skylight analyzes Sidekiq, DelayedJob, and ActiveJob background queues, and can flag allocation-heavy code and repeated queries. Endpoint timelines present aggregated, sanitized SQL queries. GraphQL queries are grouped by name in the dashboard and endpoint event sequences. A weekly report identifies improved endpoints, slowdown warnings, and endpoints that declined over six weeks. Each account includes 100,000 free traces per month. Paid tiers start at $20 a month and adjust to monthly trace volume across apps. A 30-day trial is available without a credit card. Open-source apps may apply for free public reporting. Communications are encrypted, and access to customer information is limited to selected personnel and contractors.