HostedMetrics vs Pixie

HostedMetrics is a hosted and managed monitoring service for servers, applications, services, infrastructure, and IoT metrics. It is built around Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Grafana. Teams can create or import Grafana dashboards, inspect metrics, and configure alerts. InfluxDB accepts data through StatsD, MQTT, and AWS CloudWatch, while Prometheus supports scrape targets, remote write, PushGateway, and StatsD. Integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Docker, Nginx, GitHub, CircleCI, Collectd, Slack, Telegram, webhooks, PagerDuty, and VictorOps. Plans start at $79/mo (annual), and every plan includes a 14-day trial without a credit card. Startup provides 5,000 metrics or more, 10-second resolution, two-year retention, unlimited alerts, and four team members. Professional and Business increase allowances; Enterprise has custom pricing. Professional and Business include roles, access auditing, and SSO. Eligible paid customers receive a 99.9% availability commitment.

Pixie is open-source Kubernetes observability and debugging software for developers. It collects metrics, events, traces, and logs without code changes, using dynamic eBPF probes and ingestors. Users can run community, team, or custom scripts to debug as code and share sessions. Its CLI provides health checks and charts, with a browser interface available when needed. Pixie supports hosted and self-hosted deployments; its Vizier data-collection component runs in the Kubernetes cluster. Requirements include Kubernetes v1.21 or later and Linux nodes, and pods that install BPF programs need privileged access to the Linux kernel. The project lists Cosmic Cloud and New Relic Cloud as free hosted versions. Pixie lists Minikube, EKS, GKE, AKS, and self-managed Kubernetes environments. Telemetry traffic is encrypted in transit. The requirements page says telemetry passes through Pixie Cloud without persistence, while the install guide says hosted-backend telemetry data is stored exclusively on the Kubernetes cluster, not in Pixie Cloud. Listed unsupported environments include EKS Fargate, GKE Autopilot, Docker Desktop, k3d, kind, and Windows. Help options include Community Slack, a troubleshooting guide, and GitHub issues.