Grafana Cloud Application Observability vs Thanos
Grafana Cloud Application Observability
grafana.comThanos
thanos.ioSide by side
| Figure | Grafana Cloud Application Observability | Thanos |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 5 | 1 |
| Spec score · Kubernetes Monitoring | 9.2 (#3) | 7.2 (#40) |
| Spec score · Metrics Monitoring Tools | 9.2 (#3) | 7.2 (#30) |
| Integrations | Grafana Cloud connection tiles support Java, .NET, Beyla, Grafana Alloy, OTLP, and the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. | The integrations documentation describes StoreAPI connections, including Geras for OpenTSDB and a proxy for Prometheus remote read. |
| Purpose | Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides out-of-the-box application monitoring and uses OpenTelemetry and Prometheus data to support root-cause analysis. | Thanos is an open-source set of components for building highly available Prometheus setups with long-term storage. |
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.