Observability / APM
Elastic Stack (ELK)
Elastic N.V.
Observability + logs + search built on the Elasticsearch engine — strong if you already run Elastic and want APM + metrics on the same store.
- Category
- Observability / APM
- License
- Open core
- Deployment
- SaaS or self-hosted
- Cost
- Medium
- Free tier
- Yes
- Self-host effort
- Heavy
- Maturity
- Incumbent
- Popularity
- ≈73k GitHub stars (Elasticsearch)
The catch
Resource-based pricing and the multi-license maze (AGPL/ELv2/SSPL) are confusing; great at logs/search, but APM and metrics can feel bolted onto a search engine, and retention costs balloon.
Monitors
ServersMetricsLogsTracesSyntheticsSecurityK8sCloud
Capabilities
AlertingDashboardsDistributed tracingRBACAPI
Built for
Mid-marketEnterpriseSRE / DevOps