Elastic Observability

Pricing and hosting

Pricing

Free plan

Open source

Yes (AGPL-3.0-only OR SSPL-1.0 OR Elastic-2.0)

Self-hosted

Yes

Launched

2018

Status

Active

Website

elastic.co

Plans and prices change; check the tool's own site before you decide.

What it does

Observability platforms checklist

10 of 10 confirmed in Elastic Observability's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Platforms.

• + OpenTelemetry (OTLP) ingest Yes
• + Metrics Yes
• + Logs Yes
• + Distributed traces Yes
• + APM Yes
• + Real user monitoring Yes
• + Synthetic checks Yes
• + Continuous profiling Yes
• + Built-in alerting Yes
• + SLO tracking Yes

Checked against: elastic.co, elastic.co (2), elastic.co (3), elastic.co (4), elastic.co (5), elastic.co (6)

Continuous profiling checklist

7 of 9 confirmed in Elastic Observability's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Profiling.

• + Always-on in production Yes
• + CPU profiles Yes
• x Memory or allocation profiles No
• + eBPF, no code changes Yes
• + Several languages Yes
• + Flame graph UI Yes
• + Profile comparison Yes
• ? Linked to traces Not confirmed
• + OpenTelemetry profiles Yes

Docs: Universal Profiling currently only supports CPU profiling via stack sampling; product page says it is based on OpenTelemetry (agent donated to OTel).

Checked against: elastic.co, elastic.co (2)

Alternatives to Elastic Observability

Other observability platforms tools. See all 22.

• Better Stack Telemetry Better Stack's log, metric and trace store built on ClickHouse, queried with SQL or a live-tail view. Shares an account with Better Stack uptime and on-call.
• Chronosphere Hosted observability for metrics, traces and logs at large scale, with controls to shape and cut telemetry volume. Now owned by Palo Alto Networks.
• Coralogix Observability SaaS for logs, metrics, traces and security data that processes data in-stream and keeps it in your own object storage.
• Coroot Open source observability that uses eBPF to build service maps and collect metrics, logs, traces and profiles without code changes, with root-cause hints.
• Dash0 OpenTelemetry-native observability SaaS for traces, logs and metrics, with PromQL queries, synthetic API checks and configuration as code.
• Datadog SaaS monitoring platform covering infrastructure, APM, logs, RUM, synthetics, security and incident management, collected mostly through one agent.
• Dynatrace Enterprise observability platform that instruments hosts and apps automatically through its OneAgent, maps dependencies and points to likely root causes; also offered as self-managed Dynatrace Managed.
• Grafana Cloud Grafana Labs' hosted stack: Grafana with managed Prometheus-compatible metrics, Loki logs, Tempo traces, profiles, synthetic checks and IRM.
• groundcover Kubernetes observability that uses an eBPF sensor and runs in your own cloud account, covering logs, traces, metrics and APM without code changes.
• Honeycomb Observability built for high-cardinality event data: query traces and events by any field to work out why production behaves the way it does.
• Last9 Telemetry data platform for high-cardinality metrics, logs and traces, compatible with Prometheus and OpenTelemetry.
• Middleware Full-stack observability SaaS covering infrastructure, APM, logs, RUM and synthetic checks, priced by data volume.