Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs SolarWinds Observability
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.com
SolarWinds Observability
solarwinds.comSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | SolarWinds Observability |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | $5/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 9 |
| Spec score · Application Performance Monitoring | 9.1 (#1) | 7.8 (#24) |
| Spec score · Distributed Tracing Tools | 9.2 (#1) | 7.9 (#13) |
| Spec score · Observability Platforms | 9.2 (#1) | 7.8 (#19) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Midmarket Software | 9.1 (#1) | 7.8 (#14) |
| Spec score · Runtime Monitoring Software | 9.2 (#3) | 7.8 (#27) |
| Spec score · Monitoring Observability | 9.2 (#2) | 7.8 (#15) |
| Spec score · Log Monitoring Tools | 9.2 (#3) | 7.9 (#19) |
| Spec score · Application Performance & Observability - Enterprise Software | 9.1 (#3) | 7.8 (#12) |
| Founded | 2014 | 1999 |
| Purpose | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. | SolarWinds Observability SaaS combines application, digital experience, database, infrastructure, network, and log data to help teams detect issues, optimize performance, and troubleshoot. |
| Security and compliance | Grafana Cloud lists FedRAMP, NATSEC100, PCI DSS, A-LIGN, SOC Type II, and GDPR credentials or compliance claims. | SolarWinds lists SOC 2 Type 2 reports for SolarWinds Observability SaaS and describes ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification covering its products and services. |
| Telemetry | The product brings metrics, logs, traces, and profiles into a unified view and supports drilling from a service into its signals. | The SaaS offering unifies logs, metrics, traces, database queries, and user experience data. |
Plans
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- FreeFree
- Pro$0.03 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
SolarWinds Observability
- Log Observability$5 a month
- Essentials$8 a month
- Digital Experience Observability - Real User Monitoring$10 a month
- Digital Experience Observability - Synthetic$10 a month
- Advanced$14 a month
- Network and Infrastructure Observability$15.75 a month
- Premier$17.50 a month
- Application Observability$27.50 a month
- Database Observability$70 a month
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.
SolarWinds Observability
SolarWinds Observability has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.