Mackerel vs MetricFire

Mackerel is a cloud-based SaaS service for monitoring servers and team-managed infrastructure. Installing its agent starts monitoring, after which hosts can be grouped into services and roles. It visualizes host metrics and user-defined service measures, including response time, sales and page views. Monitoring features include combining metrics, tracking predicted values and machine-learning anomaly detection. Cloud integrations cover Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud; a container agent treats Amazon ECS tasks and Kubernetes pods as hosts. Users can extend monitoring with open-source plugins, APIs and the mkr command-line tool. Customer Reliability Engineers can offer technical guidance on implementation and use, while standard-plan technical support is email-only. The free plan has five standard and micro hosts total, 500 metrics, one-day retention, 10 monitoring rules, one dashboard and up to 5M trace spans. A two-week trial includes Standard-plan functions and a 100M-span allowance. Standard host usage costs 2,180 yen, tax included, per host month.

MetricFire is a web and API service that runs Graphite and Grafana for monitoring metrics, dashboards, and alerting. Custom application metrics can arrive over TCP, UDP, HTTP POST, or StatsD without an agent or SDK. Built-in Graphite alerting connects with Slack, PagerDuty, and email. Listed integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Heroku, Telegraf, Prometheus, Redis, and PostgreSQL, alongside Kubernetes, serverless, and synthetic monitoring. Intro costs $16 a month billed annually and includes 500 metrics, six-month retention, 30-second resolution, two team users, 10 alerts, and unlimited dashboards. Basic is $84 a month billed annually with 1,000 metrics and two-year retention; Core is $429 a month billed annually with 5,000 metrics and the same listed allowances. A custom plan is available by contacting MetricFire. There is no free plan, but a 14-day trial is offered.