groundcover vs Inspektor Gadget

groundcover is a cloud-native observability platform for monitoring production environments. Its eBPF sensor collects metrics, logs, and traces without code changes or manual instrumentation, processes data at the edge, and the product states that ingestion happens in real time without sampling. Bring Your Own Cloud deployment puts the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it and hosts the UI. Fully On-Prem deployment places both backend and UI on customer premises, including cloud or physical servers. Integrations include Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure, MongoDB Atlas, Redis Cloud, Datadog, and GitHub. Agent Mode can investigate telemetry and create dashboards, monitors, gcQL queries, and OTTL pipelines. The Free plan is free forever and includes 12-hour data retention and Slack Community support; paid plans start at $30 per host per month. Billing is based on average monthly monitored Kubernetes nodes or Linux hosts, not telemetry volume. The platform is available on Linux, self-hosted, and web.

Inspektor Gadget is an open-source toolkit and framework for collecting eBPF data and inspecting Kubernetes clusters and Linux hosts. Its gadgets package eBPF programs as OCI images that can be deployed to examine systems. The toolkit enriches low-level kernel data with context such as Kubernetes pod and container names, and can export collected information to observability tools. WebAssembly modules can process data and customize operators; developers can also use the framework through a Go library. In Kubernetes, it runs as a DaemonSet, with one pod on each cluster node. Project gadgets require Linux kernel 5.10 or later with BTF enabled. Supported Kubernetes environments include Minikube, AKS, EKS, GKS, OpenShift, and Talos; AWS Fargate, Azure Container Instances, and GKE Autopilot are listed as unsupported. Official image-based gadgets are signed, and operators can restrict which gadgets may run by digest, tag, or image prefix. Inspektor Gadget has no long-term support releases: only the latest release receives maintenance and security updates.