Observability / APM

Grafana Cloud / LGTM

Grafana Labs

The de-facto open-source observability stack — best-of-breed components for metrics/logs/traces unified under Grafana dashboards; adopt incrementally.

Category
Observability / APM
License
Open core
Deployment
SaaS or self-hosted
Cost
Low
Free tier
Yes
Self-host effort
Heavy
Maturity
Incumbent
Popularity
Gartner MQ Leader 2025; LGTM ubiquitous

The catch

It's a stack of separate systems, not one product — metrics cardinality is the silent budget-killer (a misconfigured K8s label can be $1k+/mo), and self-hosting LGTM well needs real distributed-systems expertise.

Monitors

ServersMetricsLogsTracesSyntheticsK8sCloudProfiling

Capabilities

AlertingDashboardsDistributed tracingSLO trackingAPIRBAC

Built for

SRE / DevOpsEnterpriseHomelab