Observability Tools Comparison

Choose the right tools for your distributed tracing stack

Tier 1

Free & Open Source

Self-hosted solutions with no licensing costs
📊
Jaeger
CNCF

End-to-end distributed tracing system originally developed by Uber. Native OpenTelemetry support with powerful query capabilities.

  • Native OTLP ingestion
  • Service dependency graph
  • Trace comparison
  • Adaptive sampling
Cost
Free
Setup Effort
Medium
đŸŽĩ
Grafana Tempo
Grafana Labs

Cost-effective, high-scale distributed tracing backend. Integrates seamlessly with Grafana dashboards and Prometheus metrics.

  • Object storage backend (S3, GCS)
  • TraceQL query language
  • Metrics from traces
  • Grafana native integration
Cost
Free
Setup Effort
Medium
🔭
Zipkin
OpenZipkin

Lightweight distributed tracing system. Simple to deploy with minimal dependencies. Good for getting started quickly.

  • Simple deployment
  • Multiple storage backends
  • Browser-based UI
  • Low resource usage
Cost
Free
Setup Effort
Low
đŸ”Ĩ
Prometheus
CNCF

Industry-standard metrics collection and alerting. PromQL query language enables powerful metric analysis.

  • Pull-based metric collection
  • PromQL query language
  • AlertManager integration
  • Service discovery
Cost
Free
Setup Effort
Medium
Tier 2

Cloud Managed Services

Managed solutions from cloud providers - pay per use
☁ī¸
Azure Monitor
Microsoft

Full-stack monitoring for Azure resources. Application Insights provides APM with automatic instrumentation for .NET apps.

  • Native Azure integration
  • Application Map visualization
  • Smart detection alerts
  • KQL query language
Cost
Setup Effort
Low
🌩ī¸
AWS X-Ray
Amazon

Distributed tracing for AWS applications. Deep integration with Lambda, ECS, and other AWS services.

  • AWS service integration
  • Service map
  • Insights and analytics
  • Sampling rules
Cost
Setup Effort
Low
🔷
Google Cloud Trace
Google

Distributed tracing for Google Cloud. Native OTLP support and integration with Cloud Logging and Monitoring.

  • Native OTLP support
  • Latency analysis
  • Integration with Cloud Ops
  • Automatic context propagation
Cost
Setup Effort
Low
📈
Grafana Cloud
Grafana Labs

Managed Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo stack. Generous free tier makes it ideal for small teams.

  • Full observability stack
  • Generous free tier
  • Alerting and dashboards
  • Synthetic monitoring
Cost
Free tier
Setup Effort
Very Low
Tier 3

Enterprise APM Platforms

Full-featured APM with advanced analytics and support
🐕
Datadog
Datadog Inc.

Comprehensive monitoring and security platform. Excellent auto-instrumentation and ML-powered insights.

  • Unified observability
  • ML-powered alerts
  • Automatic instrumentation
  • Real user monitoring
Cost
$31/host/mo
Setup Effort
Very Low
đŸŸĸ
New Relic
New Relic Inc.

All-in-one observability platform with generous free tier. Strong distributed tracing and error tracking capabilities.

  • 100GB/month free
  • Distributed tracing
  • Error tracking
  • Browser monitoring
Cost
Free tier
Setup Effort
Low
💜
Dynatrace
Dynatrace

AI-powered full-stack observability. Automatic discovery and topology mapping with root cause analysis.

  • AI-powered root cause
  • Automatic topology
  • Full stack monitoring
  • Session replay
Cost
$69/host/mo
Setup Effort
Very Low
đŸ”ĩ
Splunk APM
Splunk (Cisco)

Enterprise-grade APM with powerful search and analytics. Strong integration with Splunk's log analytics platform.

  • Full-fidelity tracing
  • No sampling required
  • AlwaysOn profiling
  • Splunk integration
Cost
Contact sales
Setup Effort
Medium

Feature Comparison Matrix

Feature Jaeger Tempo Azure Monitor Datadog New Relic
Native OTLP Support ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Distributed Tracing ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Metrics Integration ✗ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Log Correlation ✗ ~ ✓ ✓ ✓
Browser RUM ✗ ✗ ✓ ✓ ✓
Service Dependency Map ✓ ~ ✓ ✓ ✓
ML-powered Insights ✗ ✗ ~ ✓ ✓
Free/OSS Option ✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✓

✓ Full support   ~ Partial/via integration   ✗ Not available

Recommended Stack for CNC Optimizer

Based on the existing Azure infrastructure and the need for end-to-end tracing from browser to Julia, we recommend a hybrid approach:

Primary Backend
Azure Monitor + App Insights
Visualization
Grafana Cloud (free tier)
Collector
OTel Collector
Frontend SDK
@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-web

This stack provides native Azure integration for .NET services, cross-platform visualization in Grafana, and full OpenTelemetry compatibility for the entire request flow from browser to Julia inference.