Directory
Observability tools, by hub
A single list of every tool referenced across this wiki, grouped by which hub it primarily addresses. Many platforms span more than one hub — where that's the case, they're listed under each hub they cover.
Metrics
Read the guide →AWS's native monitoring service for metrics, logs, and alarms across cloud resources, now extended into application-level tracing through Application Signals.
An OpenTelemetry-native observability platform built entirely on open standards like OTLP, with no proprietary agent or data format.
A unified commercial observability platform covering infrastructure metrics, APM/distributed tracing, log management, and continuous profiling.
The open-source dashboarding and visualization platform that has become the default front end for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles alike.
Grafana Labs' horizontally scalable, long-term storage backend for Prometheus metrics, built as the successor to the Cortex project.
A purpose-built time series database from InfluxData, now rebuilt in Rust around SQL and InfluxQL as its primary query languages.
A managed, all-in-one observability platform combining metrics, traces, logs, and AI-driven analysis under a single usage-based pricing model.
The CNCF-graduated metrics collection and alerting system built around a pull model and its own query language, PromQL.
An open-source, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform combining traces, metrics, and logs in one UI.
A high-performance observability data pipeline for collecting, transforming, and routing logs (and metrics) to any backend.
A fast, Prometheus-compatible time series database built for high cardinality, long retention, and lower storage overhead than vanilla Prometheus.
Traces
Read the guide →AWS's native distributed tracing service, transitioning to OpenTelemetry-based instrumentation and now the trace storage layer behind Application Signals.
An OpenTelemetry-native observability platform built entirely on open standards like OTLP, with no proprietary agent or data format.
A unified commercial observability platform covering infrastructure metrics, APM/distributed tracing, log management, and continuous profiling.
An AI-assisted, full-stack observability platform built around automatic instrumentation and causal root-cause analysis.
Grafana Labs' open-source tracing backend that stores traces in object storage and indexes only trace IDs, trading flexibility for low cost at scale.
A managed observability platform built around high-cardinality, wide structured events, marketed as the model for what its founders call 'Observability 2.0'.
A CNCF-graduated, open-source distributed tracing system originally built at Uber, now rebuilt on the OpenTelemetry Collector core.
An application observability platform that grew from error tracking into tracing, profiling, and structured logs from one SDK.
An open-source, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform combining traces, metrics, and logs in one UI.
One of the earliest open-source distributed tracing systems, still widely deployed and broadly compatible.
Logs
Read the guide →An OpenTelemetry-native observability platform built entirely on open standards like OTLP, with no proprietary agent or data format.
A unified commercial observability platform covering infrastructure metrics, APM/distributed tracing, log management, and continuous profiling.
The full-text search and analytics engine at the core of the ELK stack, widely used for log storage and search.
Lightweight, widely used log collectors and forwarders that ship logs from hosts and containers to a central backend.
A log aggregation system from Grafana Labs that indexes only labels, not full log content, to keep storage and query costs low.
A log management platform built on Elasticsearch/OpenSearch with a focus on ease of setup and built-in alerting.
An application observability platform that grew from error tracking into tracing, profiling, and structured logs from one SDK.
An open-source, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform combining traces, metrics, and logs in one UI.
A long-established log management and SIEM platform, now owned by Cisco, built around its own Search Processing Language.
A cloud-native log analytics and SIEM platform aimed at both operational and security use cases.
A high-performance observability data pipeline for collecting, transforming, and routing logs (and metrics) to any backend.
Continuous Profiling
Read the guide →A low-overhead sampling profiler for the JVM, commonly used as the collection agent feeding continuous profiling backends.
A unified commercial observability platform covering infrastructure metrics, APM/distributed tracing, log management, and continuous profiling.
A statistical, low-overhead profiler for production workloads running on or off Google Cloud.
Grafana Labs' open-source continuous profiling backend, storing and querying flame-graph data alongside metrics, logs, and traces.
The emerging OpenTelemetry signal for profiles, aiming to standardize profile collection and correlation the way it did for traces.
An open-source, eBPF-based continuous profiler that profiles entire hosts without code changes or per-language agents.
A managed continuous profiling platform built by the creators of Parca, focused on eBPF-based whole-system profiling.
An application observability platform that grew from error tracking into tracing, profiling, and structured logs from one SDK.
OpenTelemetry
Read the guide →An OpenTelemetry-native observability platform built entirely on open standards like OTLP, with no proprietary agent or data format.
A vendor-agnostic proxy that receives, processes, and exports telemetry data to one or more backends.
A full microservices reference application instrumented end-to-end with OpenTelemetry, useful for learning and testing backends.
The emerging OpenTelemetry signal for profiles, aiming to standardize profile collection and correlation the way it did for traces.
Language-specific instrumentation libraries (Java, Go, Python, JS/TS, .NET, and more) for emitting traces, metrics, and logs.
Practices & Architecture
Read the guide →A Slack- and Teams-first incident management platform that runs declaration, coordination, and postmortems inside chat.
An open-source AIOps and alert-management platform that deduplicates, correlates, and routes alerts from over 100 monitoring tools.
One of the original on-call alerting and incident response platforms, now marketed as an end-to-end Operations Cloud.