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January 13, 2025

Top 10 Observability Tools for Monitoring Systems

January 13, 2025

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Observability Tools

Observability tools are a game-changer when it comes to keeping your digital systems running smoothly. They are the software that gives visibility to your systems’ and applications’ performance, health, and behavior.

They monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot issues across the infrastructure by gathering and visualizing metrics, logs, and traces. You can use them for quick detection and resolution of problems to avoid a user-unfriendly experience or system failures.

They are considered crucial for modern DevOps practices and efficient IT operations. They help you understand how your systems are performing, identify issues early, and keep everything running without hiccups.

In this blog, we’ll walk you through the top 10 observability tools so you can find the best fit for monitoring everything from cloud services to applications. Let’s explore which ones are worth considering for your infrastructure.

Why does Your Business Need Observability Tool?

Your business needs observability software because it helps keep everything running smoothly, from spotting issues early to improving system performance. Here’s how the key features of these tools can make a real difference:

  • Proactive issue detection: Observability tools watch over your systems at all times, letting you know when something’s off before it becomes a bigger problem. Features like alerting and notifications can ping you if something goes wrong—whether it’s a spike in server load or slower response times—so you can take action fast.
  • Faster Troubleshooting: In the event of something breaking, these tools can tell you pretty quickly what has happened. With distributed tracing and log aggregation, you’ll get a nice, easy view of where that request went in your system and spot the failure. That translates into less time guessing and more time fixing things for your team.
  • Improved System Reliability: These tools ensure that your systems are working as they should, all the time. With features like anomaly detection, application performance tools provide critical insights, alerting you when something’s not right so you can address issues before they affect your users. You also get visual dashboards that give you an at-a-glance view of how everything’s performing.
  • Better Decisions: The observability tool provides you with the data required for making smarter decisions. Custom metrics and reporting tools allow you to track what is important to your business, be it server uptime, resource utilization, or even user experience, and thus optimize and make well-informed decisions for the infrastructure.
  • Enhanced Collaboration: When issues surface, everyone in your team will be able to get involved quickly as a result of features such as centralized dashboards and shared access to all your data. Whether the DevOps, developers, or SREs, it is all just a matter of accessing the information in real-time while working together with others to help solve the issues.
  • Scale in confidence: As you grow your business, your systems must scale too. It is where your observability helps you track all the performance data as you are scaling. Insight into load balancing and resource optimization can allow you to go in a direction where infrastructure is running correctly without getting bungled by extraneous overheads.
  • Cost Efficiency: It helps you save money in the long run by identifying inefficiencies. Features such as metrics collection and capacity planning help you identify where you can cut back on unused resources or optimize what you already have, thereby making your operations more cost-effective.

List of Top Observability Tools

1. Sentry

Observability Tool - Sentry

Sentry is more or less a developer’s best friend when it comes to keeping applications healthy and running smoothly.

Imagine a powerful observability tool that lets you spot errors, track performance issues, and understand what is happening inside your code all in real time.

It works perfectly with popular tools like GitHub, Slack, and Jira so that you get alerts, prioritize what matters most, and fix problems faster.

Whether it’s tracing the root cause of a slow feature or replaying a session to see exactly where a user got stuck, Sentry gives you the context you need to solve issues before they impact more people.

It’s all about making your software more reliable, improving user experiences, and helping you ship better code with confidence.

Features:

  • Real-Time Error Monitoring
  • Performance Monitoring and Tracing
  • Session Replay
  • Seamless Integrations with Development Tools
  • Automated Alerts and Custom Notifications
  • Root Cause Analysis with Detailed Context
  • Support for Multiple Programming Languages
  • Code Coverage and Insights
  • Privacy Controls for Data Security
  • User Impact-Based Issue Prioritization

Pricing:

  • Developer: Free plan for solo developers with error monitoring, tracing, and email notifications.
  • Team: $26/month for growing teams with unlimited users, integrations, and 7-day insights.
  • Business: $80/month for large teams with custom dashboards, workflows, and 90-day insights.
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing for advanced needs, offering dedicated support and enhanced customization.
Website: https://sentry.io/welcome/

2. Dynatrace

Observability Tool - Dynatrace

Dynatrace is like having a smart, all-seeing companion that helps you manage and optimize your entire digital ecosystem with ease.

It’s an observability software designed to tackle the complexity of today’s cloud environments, using AI-driven insights to provide answers—not just more data. With Dynatrace, you can monitor your applications, infrastructure, and user experience all in one place.

It tracks performance issues to the root cause, keeps your systems secure, and helps automate repetitive tasks, freeing up your team to focus on innovation.

Scaling a startup or managing enterprise-level operations, with Dynatrace, delivering smooth, reliable, and secure digital experiences feels like a breeze.

Features:

  • End-to-End Observability
  • Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
  • Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Real User and Synthetic Monitoring
  • Log Analytics and Management
  • Distributed Tracing and Code-Level Insights
  • AI-Powered Causal Analysis
  • Automated Problem Detection and Resolution
  • Application Security and Threat Detection
  • Customizable Dashboards and Business Analytics

Pricing:

  • Full-Stack Monitoring: Comprehensive observability for apps, microservices, and Kubernetes, with AIOps included ($0.08 per hour for 8 GiB hosts).
  • Infrastructure Monitoring: Cloud, container, and network monitoring with unlimited host size and AIOps ($0.04 per hour for any size host).
  • Kubernetes Platform Monitoring: Detailed insights into Kubernetes workloads, pods, and nodes ($0.002 per hour for any size pod).
  • Application Security: Real-time vulnerability analysis and threat protection with AIOps ($0.018 per hour for 8 GiB host).
  • Real User Monitoring: Tracks user behavior in mobile, hybrid, and single-page apps ($0.00225 per session).
  • Synthetic Monitoring: Monitors HTTP requests and third-party APIs for performance ($0.001 per synthetic request).
  • Log Management & Analytics: Flexible pricing for log ingestion and retention with full observability ($0.20 per GiB for ingestion and $0.02 per GiB-day for retention with included queries).
Website: https://www.dynatrace.com/

3. Better Stack

Observability Tool - Better Stack

Better Stack is like the go-to toolkit for keeping a watchful eye on your software with powerful Observability Tools, ensuring things work well.

This is an observability platform that provides you with all the insight you need to monitor your applications, track performance, and troubleshoot faster.

With Better Stack, you can get real-time logs, manage incidents via Slack, and even have a status page for users to update them on any downtimes.

It also integrates seamlessly with Open Telemetry for easy infrastructure monitoring and lets you visualize data through dashboards so you always know how your system is performing.

Whether you’re focusing on improving user experience or keeping systems stable, Better Stack helps you do it all with clarity and ease.

Features:

  • Website Performance Monitoring
  • Incident Management via Slack
  • Status Page for Downtime Communication
  • Log Management and Analysis
  • Open Telemetry-Native Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Customizable Observability Dashboards
  • Real-Time Metrics Collection and Insights
  • End-to-end application and System Monitoring

Pricing:

  • Free Plan: $0/month, includes 10 monitors, email alerts with 3-minute checks, 1 status page, and 3 GB logs with a 3-day retention.
  • Pay as You Go: Starts at $29/month, includes everything in the Free plan plus 1 responder license, unlimited team members, and 30 GB logs with a 7-day retention.
Website: https://betterstack.com/

4. Splunk

Observability Tool - Splunk

Splunk is an all-in-one observability platform that allows organizations to monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot their entire tech stack in real-time.

It brings everything together-from infrastructure to applications gives you full visibility into how systems are performing. Splunk’s AI-powered insights, such as Service Maps and Trace Analytics, can help identify issues quickly, so you can act on them before they impact your users.

Whether it’s the performance of an application, the health of the infrastructure, or the digital experience, Splunk offers everything you need to run services reliably and delight customers.

Features:

  • Full-Fidelity Monitoring
  • Real-Time Data Collection and Analysis
  • AI-Powered Analytics
  • Service Maps for System Visualization
  • Trace Analytics for Troubleshooting
  • Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
  • Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)
  • Proactive Issue Detection and Resolution
  • Unified Observability Across Tech Stack

Pricing:

  • Free Trial: Allows exploration of the platform.
  • Pay-As-You-Go: Pricing based on data ingestion and usage.
  • Subscription Plans: Includes enterprise-level pricing for large-scale use.
  • Custom Pricing: Available for large enterprises or specific requirements.
Website: https://www.splunk.com/

5. New Relic

Observability Tool - New Relic

New Relic is a high-performance observability tool that provides you with tracking capabilities in your entire tech stack in real time, ensuring things are working accordingly.

You get deep insights into one platform you want to monitor an app’s performance, infrastructure, or digital experiences.

It is rich in features like APM, infrastructure monitoring, and more than 775 integrations, so it can integrate seamlessly with all the tools that you are already using. Plus, with AI-driven insights and proactive monitoring, it help you spot issues before they turn into problems.

Whether you’re a developer or a business leader, New Relic is designed to help you understand your systems better, optimize performance, and keep your users happy.

Features:

  • Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
  • Infrastructure Monitoring
  • Digital Experience Monitoring
  • AI-Powered Insights
  • AIOps for Anomaly Detection
  • Real-Time Monitoring
  • Over 775 Integrations
  • End-to-End Observability
  • Custom Dashboards
  • Proactive Issue Detection and Resolution

Pricing: contact them for pricing of these plans,

  • Free: 100GB data ingest, unlimited basic and core users, one free full platform user, and access to 30+ capabilities.
  • Standard: For small teams, limited to 5 full platform users, 2-day support SLA, SAML SSO.
  • Pro: No user limits, 2-hour critical support response SLA, Data Plus eligibility.
  • Enterprise: Includes all Pro features, FedRAMP & HIPAA eligibility, 1-hour critical support response SLA.
Website: https://newrelic.com/

6. UptimeRobot

Observability Tool - UptimeRobot

UptimeRobot is a popular, straightforward web monitoring tool that falls under Observability Tools, ensuring uptime and smooth running of services.

It checks your sites at a regular interval and sends alerts in case something is wrong. Given support for multiple notification channels, including email, SMS, or Slack, UptimeRobot is an excellent choice for instant notification.

It is suitable for developers, small businesses, and those exploring small business ideas, as well as for anyone monitoring their online services. They also provide a free plan to start with and flexible paid plans for more advanced needs.

Features:

  • SSL Monitoring
  • Port & Cron Job Monitoring
  • Keyword Monitoring
  • Notifications
  • Multiple Plans
  • Website Monitoring

Pricing:

  • Free: 50 monitors, 5-minute monitoring interval, basic features.
  • Solo: $8.7/month, 60-second monitoring interval, 9 integrations, 1 notify seat.
  • Team: $34.29/month, 100 monitors, 3 notify seats, full-featured status pages.
  • Enterprise: $54/month, 30-second monitoring interval, 5 notify seats, and login seats, custom quotes available.
Website: https://uptimerobot.com/

7. Grafana

Observability Tool - Grafana

Grafana is one of the most popular open-source platforms for observability. This helps teams to visualize, analyze, and monitor metrics, logs, and traces in real-time. For similar tools, explore open-source AI platforms.

Grafana integrates with many different types of data sources and enables you to create highly interactive and customizable dashboards. Grafana will help you detect issues early and give deeper insights into the performance of your system.

Whether you are involved in infrastructure or monitoring application health, you can ensure smooth operations and performance using flexible, powerful, and awesome features from this tool.

Features:

  • Custom Dashboards
  • Real-Time Monitoring
  • Advanced Visualizations
  • Integrations with Data Sources
  • Alerting & Notification System
  • Data Exploration
  • Scalable Performance
  • Collaborative Sharing

Pricing:

  • Free Forever: Offers basic features with capped usage (e.g., 10k metrics, 50 GB logs).
  • Pro: Starts at $19/month, with increased usage limits and community support.
  • Advanced Premium Bundle: Starts at $299/month, and includes additional usage, enterprise plugins, and 24×7 support.
Website: https://grafana.com/

8. Prometheus

Observability Tool - Prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting tool that is quite powerful. It is designed to be a good fit for complex dynamic systems like microservices.

It works by gathering time-series data, and metrics with timestamps, using the flexible query language called PromQL. Prometheus exceeds in performance and system health monitoring, especially for cloud-native applications.

It is straightforward to integrate into most services and has real-time monitoring and alerting capabilities.

Features:

  • Multi-dimensional data model
  • Powerful querying with PromQL
  • Time-series data storage
  • Built-in alerting system
  • Integration with various services using exporters
  • Pull-based data collection model
  • High scalability for large environments

Pricing: Prometheus itself is free and open-source, but there are different pricing models available in its ecosystem:

  • Self-hosted (free): You manage and host Prometheus yourself, paying only for infrastructure.
  • Managed services: There are cloud services compatible with Prometheus with various plans for usage-based charges.
  • Commercial distributions: Companies offer high-value versions of Prometheus that include some advanced features and support at a cost.
Website: https://prometheus.io/

9. Coralogix

Observability Tool - Coralogix

Coralogix is one of the new observability tools for businesses to enable them to monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot all of their technology stacks in real time.

It supports such strong functions as log analytics, APM, and RUM to identify your problems quickly and focus on fixing them.

The system relies on AI to provide actionable insights as well as is highly compatible with other platforms. In short, Coralogix has both scalability and flexibility, no matter if it is a new startup or a large enterprise. 

Features:

  • Real-time log analytics
  • AI-driven insights
  • Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
  • Real User Monitoring (RUM)
  • Security observability
  • Integrations with popular tools and services
  • Scalability for growing businesses

Pricing: Coralogix’s pricing is data usage-based with flexible units in logs, metrics, traces, and more. Their system scales to accommodate businesses of all sizes, and they have priced the service to be just as suitable for small teams as large enterprises. There are custom options for higher volumes of data.

Website: https://coralogix.com/

10. ServiceNow

Observability Tool - ServiceNow

ServiceNow is an enterprise platform that combines tools for observability with powerful features for automation in optimizing business operations. I

t provides real-time insights into system performance, IT infrastructure, and business services. In doing so, teams can detect issues in advance.

Through AI, ServiceNow improves problem resolution, collaboration, and productivity as a whole. Businesses can streamline workflows, automate several repetitive tasks, and raise service reliability.

Features:

  • Real-time IT monitoring 
  • Incident management
  • AI-powered problem detection and resolution
  • Automated workflows 
  • Performance tracking 
  • Asset management and service automation
  • Collaboration tools 
Pricing: customized pricing
Website: https://www.servicenow.com/

How to Choose the Right Observability Tools?

Here are the different stages you can follow to pick the right observability tool:

1. Know What You Need

Understanding what you want is the very first step when it comes to choosing the appropriate observability tool.

Do you just need log monitoring, some metric tracking, or a view of everything, metrics, and traces as well? Certain tools excel at one aspect and do that job well while others can cover everything for you. Think of the size of your infrastructure also, cloud-native, hybrid, or on-premise, which impacts your selection as well.

Lastly, consider how much customization you need. Some teams prefer an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box solution, while others need more flexibility and configuration options.

2. Make Sure It Fits With Your Tech Stack

You want something that just fits in smoothly with your existing setup; whether you are using cloud services, containers, or microservices, a tool should rather not create too many issues and should easily fit into your workflow.

Ideally, it should support industry standards like OpenTelemetry and Prometheus to easily integrate these tools.

Additionally, ensure that you can pull data from all your systems—logs, events, traces—into one place so that you don’t need to juggle with a multitude of tools.

3. Is It Easy to Use?

 The tool should make getting data easy, with a little learning curve. The dashboard is simple to use and visualizations prompt those important trends or issues so things that matter in your team become the focus.

Look for one that lets you set up alerts for things that matter to your team. It can be a threshold or an anomaly. You ought to be able to dig deeper into the data easily to figure out what’s going wrong when issues pop up.

4. Scalability and Performance

With more data in your system, it should not get slower. Your tool should be able to handle the increase without slowness; it should be able to scale with your infrastructure and keep up with real-time monitoring.

Moreover, you also need a tool that doesn’t only store data but lets you query and analyze quickly, even with lots of historical data to sift through.

5. Customization and Flexibility

Every organization has unique needs, so you will want something that can adapt. Can it track custom metrics that are meaningful to your business? Does it have features such as anomaly detection or predictive insights? You’ll want to find tools that enable you to create custom dashboards tailored to specific teams, like DevOps, developers, and site reliability engineers so that everyone can zero in on what matters most to them.

6. Security and Compliance

Security is a must. Ensure the tool has features such as encryption, access control, and audit logs to protect sensitive data. If your company falls in a regulated industry, check that the tool complies with standards like GDPR, SOC 2, or any other relevant regulations.

7. Cost and Budget

Cost does matter. So let’s have a closer look at the pricing model to make sure it aligns with the budget. Tools come in a usage-based, subscription-based, and even freemium model. It is worth remembering that price does not only account for licensing.

The cost of training, support, and other costs for maintenance must also be taken into account. Compare this cost to its value in making sure that one gets exactly what they need without breaking the bank.

8. Vendor Support and Community

Good support is critical when things go wrong. Check what kind of support the vendor offers—whether it’s chat, email, or phone support—and how fast they can respond.

Having great documentation and tutorials can be a huge difference-maker as well, especially if your team will be using it for the very first time. A strong community is just the best, especially with open-source tools, as this is a quick pool to use for troubleshooting and tips.

9. Trending Tools and Solutions

It is worthwhile going through a long list of widely used tools across the market for observability today. There’s Prometheus with Grafana as an ideal choice when targeting metrics and there is a great focus on the deep integration aspect it offers.

Full-stack solutions where logs, metrics, and tracing are considered altogether are Datadog. New Relic has long been an asset for performance aspects with deeper information. Elastic Stack (ELK) is fantastic for log management and, combined with Elastic APM, can cover metrics and traces too.

Ai-powered features are also available, and a good pick here is Dynatrace. And if you want a vendor-neutral one, then that would probably be OpenTelemetry, where you can collect and export the data coming from any source.

Conclusion

To wrap up, the choice of the right Observability Tools is what keeps your systems running smoothly.

Be it something straightforward or a more comprehensive solution, the right tool will give you the insights you need to spot and fix issues quickly, helping your team deliver a better experience for your users.

By thinking about what matters most to your team—like how well it integrates, scales, and fits into your budget—you’ll be able to choose the right fit.

With the top tools we’ve covered, you’ve got a solid foundation to make a decision that will boost your monitoring game and improve your overall operations.

FAQs

Why is observability important for my business?

Observability gives you visibility into your infrastructure and applications, helping you detect and address performance issues before they impact users. This leads to better user experiences, improved operational efficiency, and reduced downtime, which is crucial for maintaining business continuity.

What's the difference between metrics, logs, and traces?

  • Metrics are quantitative data that show the performance of your system over time (for example, CPU utilization, and response times).
  • Logs are detailed records of events in your system that can help point to specific actions or issues.
  • Traces show how requests or transactions flow through your system and follow the sequence of activities, leading you to where problems may arise.

Can observability software aid system issues?

Absolutely! Observability software gives you the data you need to identify where things are going wrong in your system. It’s whether you’re tracking down slow performance, pinpointing errors, or just understanding why something is happening and then troubleshooting faster.

How do observability tools integrate with my existing tech stack?

Most observability software support integration with a wide variety of systems, platforms, and cloud environments. They can pull data from databases, application servers, microservices, containers, and other technologies in your stack. Many tools also offer ready-made plugins or APIs to make integration seamless.

Do observability software help with scaling my system?

Yes, observability software can be used to monitor your system’s performance as it scales. They give you insights that you will need to make sure that your infrastructure can handle the increased load, track potential bottlenecks, and adjust resources accordingly before issues arise.

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