Mackerel vs Robusta

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.

Robusta is an AI SRE offered through SaaS, a customer VPC deployment, or full self-hosting with the customer’s own LLM key. It learns an environment, groups duplicate alerts, filters noise, and surfaces new issues. When an alert arrives, its AI investigates root cause and blast radius, proposes a fix, and escalates to a human when needed. Alerts can enter through webhooks, HTTP requests, or MCP events, with listed tools including Prometheus AlertManager, Grafana, Datadog, PagerDuty, and Jira. Holmes provides native integrations for Kubernetes, OpenShift, AWS, Azure, GCP, Prometheus, Grafana, PostgreSQL, GitHub, and ServiceNow. Other sources can connect through MCP servers or HTTP APIs, including generated HTTP connectors. Customers may use their own models and API keys and disable Robusta-hosted models. The agent is read-only by default; write access for auto-remediation is optional. Queries, log lines, and conclusions are logged and replayable. Robusta says customer data is not used for model training and that it is SOC 2 compliant. Pricing is on request.