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Datadog vs Grafana stack vs OpenTelemetry + open source
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Observability
Evaluating Observability this quarter? This page brings together what changed, which companies are most active, what practitioners are asking and how to build a shortlist.
Logs, metrics, traces and synthetic monitoring, plus the shift to OpenTelemetry, cost-aware telemetry and AI-assisted incident response.
What changed recently
Start with the news. These are the Observability stories getting the most attention right now, so you know what has shifted before you talk to anyone.
Observability
Forrester study models 466% ROI from unified observability with Dynatrace
AI is adding new operational demands to already complex technology environments. Technology leaders must improve reliability and developer productivity, control costs, and demonstrate business value while understanding how AI models and agents affect the applications and infrastructure around them. Dynatrace commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the potential business value of unified…
ObservabilityOriginal research
Take Grafana Labs' 5th annual Observability Survey
Over the past year, "agentic" has gone from an emerging buzzword to an integral part of worklife for many engineers, and that's just scratching the surface on all that's changed. With so much upheaval, there's never been a better time to capture the pulse of the industry, which is why we want you to take Grafana Labs' fifth annual Observability Survey . We're asking the questions you're probably…
Observability
How we extended Apache DataFusion to execute one query across many machines
Learn how Datadog built Distributed DataFusion to scale interactive Apache DataFusion queries across multiple machines.
Observability
Manage your OpenTelemetry Collectors with Fleet Management in Grafana Cloud
If you’ve built your telemetry pipelines around OpenTelemetry Collectors, you’ve already invested in a collector distribution, YAML configuration, and a deployment model that fits your infrastructure. As that deployment grows, managing it means keeping shared configuration consistent, accommodating different workloads, and understanding whether your collectors are healthy. Fleet Management in…
Observability
Debug Production at the Speed of AI
Your coding agent can debug production issues now. Yes… Not just “help you debug.” Actually run the investigation… FOR YOU! In this new era of agentic development, speed matters. And in the old days (you know… last week or so) we used to investigate production bugs ourselves. Manually. Like humans. But for a lot of […] The post Debug Production at the Speed of AI appeared first on Coralogix .
Observability
Dr. Cat Hicks on the Psychology of Software Teams
Dr. Cat Hicks, author of The Psychology of Software Teams and founder of Catharsis, joins Charity Majors for episode two of Leading With Observability. They talk organizational trust in AI, identity threat among developers, and how leaders can create the structure that reduces anxiety in this new era.
Observability
Cribl × Fireworks AI: SecIT joins the Specialized Intelligence Index
Observability
Define user actions on your web app with visual labeling in Product Analytics
Learn how to label autocaptured web actions in Datadog Product Analytics without code changes, then reuse those definitions across behavioral analysis.
Companies to know in Observability
Those stories keep returning to the same names. These are the companies we track in this category; each profile has its news, solutions and published reviews.
Datadog
New York City, New York, USA
Datadog is an American observability and security company founded in 2010 by Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc and headquartered in New York City. Its SaaS platform provides infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, real user monitoring, synthetic testing, cloud security and incident management for cloud-scale applications. Datadog has been listed on Nasdaq (DDOG) since 2019.
Dynatrace
Waltham, Massachusetts, USA
Dynatrace is an observability and application security company founded in Linz, Austria, in 2005 and headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. Its AI-powered platform covers infrastructure and application monitoring, log analytics, digital experience monitoring, application security and automation, built on its Grail data lakehouse and Davis AI engine. Dynatrace has been listed on the NYSE (DT) since 2019.
Splunk
San Francisco, California, USA
Splunk is a US software company, founded in 2003 in San Francisco, that makes data platforms for security and observability. Its products include Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Cloud Platform, Splunk Enterprise Security (SIEM), Splunk SOAR, Splunk Observability Cloud and IT Service Intelligence. Cisco completed its acquisition of Splunk in March 2024, and Splunk now operates as part of Cisco.
New Relic
San Francisco, California, USA
New Relic is an observability company that provides a SaaS platform for monitoring applications, infrastructure, logs, browsers, mobile apps and AI workloads. Its all-in-one platform combines telemetry data with APM, distributed tracing, dashboards and alerting under usage-based pricing. Founded in 2008 by Lew Cirne, New Relic is headquartered in San Francisco and was taken private by Francisco Partners and TPG in 2023.
Grafana Labs
New York, New York, USA
Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana, the open source visualisation and dashboarding tool, and the LGTM observability stack of Loki, Grafana, Tempo and Mimir. It sells Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise for metrics, logs, traces, profiles, load testing with k6 and incident response. Founded in 2014 and operating remote-first, Grafana Labs is privately held.
Elastic
San Francisco, California, USA
Elastic is the company behind Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash and Beats, collectively known as the Elastic Stack. Founded in 2012 by Shay Banon and others, it is incorporated in the Netherlands and operates as a distributed company with a US headquarters in San Francisco. It offers search, observability and security solutions, delivered via Elastic Cloud or self-managed. Elastic is listed on the NYSE (ESTC).
Honeycomb
San Francisco, California, USA
Honeycomb is a US observability company whose platform lets engineering teams query high-cardinality, high-dimensionality event and trace data to debug production systems. It is built around OpenTelemetry and offers distributed tracing, service-level objectives, BubbleUp anomaly analysis and log analysis. Honeycomb was founded in 2016 by Charity Majors and Christine Yen, is based in San Francisco and is privately held.
Chronosphere
Chronosphere is a cloud native observability company founded in 2019 by Martin Mao and Rob Skillington, creators of the M3 metrics platform at Uber. It offers the Chronosphere Observability Platform for metrics, traces, logs and events, with controls to shape and reduce telemetry data volumes, and Calyptia-based telemetry pipelines. Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of Chronosphere in January 2026.
ServiceNow
Santa Clara, California, USA
ServiceNow is a US enterprise software company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, founded in 2004 by Fred Luddy. Its ServiceNow AI Platform automates workflows across IT service management, IT operations, security, customer service, HR and field service, with AI agents, low-code app building and observability capabilities. ServiceNow is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
IBM
Armonk, New York, USA
IBM is a US technology company providing hybrid cloud and AI software, infrastructure and consulting. Its portfolio includes Red Hat OpenShift, the watsonx AI and data platform, IBM Z mainframes and Power servers, IBM Storage, Db2 databases, and automation and observability software such as Instana and HashiCorp Terraform. Founded in 1911 and headquartered in Armonk, New York, IBM is listed on the NYSE.
Sumo Logic
Redwood City, California, USA
Sumo Logic is a US cloud-native log analytics company founded in 2010 and headquartered in Redwood City, California. It provides a SaaS platform for log management, observability and security analytics, including cloud SIEM, used by DevOps, IT and security teams. Sumo Logic was listed on Nasdaq from 2020 until Francisco Partners took it private in 2023.
LogicMonitor
Santa Barbara, California, USA
LogicMonitor is a SaaS observability company whose LM Envision platform monitors hybrid IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, cloud services, containers, applications and logs, with AI-driven event correlation through its Edwin AI product. It serves enterprise IT and operations teams and managed service providers. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, it is privately held and backed by Vista Equity Partners.
SolarWinds
Austin, Texas, USA
SolarWinds is an IT management and observability software company headquartered in Austin, Texas, founded in 1999. It sells SolarWinds Observability for SaaS and self-hosted environments, Network Performance Monitor, Server & Application Monitor, Database Performance Analyzer and service desk software. In 2025 SolarWinds was taken private by private-equity firm Turn/River Capital.
Coralogix
Coralogix is an observability platform company founded in 2014 by Ariel Assaraf. It provides a SaaS platform for logs, metrics, traces, real user monitoring and security data, using an in-stream analysis architecture that processes telemetry before indexing to help control data storage costs. Coralogix also offers AI observability capabilities for monitoring generative AI applications. The company is privately held.
PagerDuty
San Francisco, California, USA
PagerDuty is a digital operations management company whose PagerDuty Operations Cloud provides incident management, on-call scheduling and alerting, AIOps event correlation, runbook and process automation, and customer service operations. It serves engineering, IT operations and support teams responding to incidents in critical systems. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, PagerDuty is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
BigPanda
BigPanda is a US AIOps company founded in 2012. Its platform uses machine learning and AI to correlate alerts from monitoring, observability and change tools into incidents, surface probable root causes and automate incident response workflows, helping IT operations and site reliability teams in large enterprises reduce alert noise and resolve outages faster.
Kentik
San Francisco, California, USA
Kentik is a US network observability company whose SaaS platform analyses flow data, device metrics, cloud flow logs, routing and synthetic test results to help teams monitor, troubleshoot and secure networks. It serves enterprises, cloud-native companies and service providers, with traffic analytics, DDoS detection, cloud network visibility and capacity planning. Founded in 2014, Kentik was acquired by Infoblox in August 2026.
Checkly
Berlin, Germany
Checkly is a synthetic monitoring and API monitoring company founded in 2018 and based in Berlin, Germany. Its platform uses Playwright-based browser checks and API checks defined as code, with a CLI and Terraform provider, to test and monitor web applications and APIs in production. It targets developers and SRE teams practising monitoring as code.
Cribl
San Francisco, California, USA
Cribl is a telemetry data management company founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Francisco. Its products, including Cribl Stream, Cribl Edge, Cribl Search and Cribl Lake, let IT and security teams collect, route, reduce, enrich and search logs, metrics and traces across observability and SIEM tools. Cribl was founded by Clint Sharp, Dritan Bitincka and Ledion Bitincka and is privately held.
Microsoft
Redmond, Washington, USA
Microsoft is a global technology company whose enterprise portfolio spans the Azure cloud platform, Microsoft 365 productivity software, Dynamics 365 business applications, security products and developer tools such as GitHub. Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft is one of the largest providers of cloud and AI services to businesses.
What practitioners are asking
Vendor news only tells you half of it. This is what people working in Observability are discussing and asking each other.
New
How are you controlling observability costs without losing visibility?
Sampling, tiered retention, OpenTelemetry pipelines, switching vendors? What cut the bill the most?
Build a shortlist
With the news, the companies and the open questions in view, pick three to five companies whose products match your problem, read their recent stories and put your remaining questions to the community before you speak to sales.
More Observability stories
If you want more background, here is more of the recent coverage.
Observability
Manage synthetic checks at scale: Introducing folders in Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring
As your use of Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring grows, so does the number of checks you need to manage across services, environments, and teams. Eventually, a single flat list of checks becomes difficult to navigate, and even simple questions get harder to answer: Which checks belong to the payments team? Can I disable everything in staging during a maintenance window? Who should be able to…
Observability
More Databases, Same Headcount? How AI-Driven RCA Helps DBAs Scale Database Coverage
10/07/26 Working as a DBA has always meant doing more with less. But the gap between estate growth and headcount is becoming harder to ignore. Database platforms keep multiplying. Instance counts keep climbing. The DBA team rarely grows at the same rate. Often, the assumption ... The post More Databases, Same Headcount? How AI-Driven RCA Helps DBAs Scale Database Coverage appeared first on…
Observability
OpenTelemetry Collector Configuration for LLM Observability
A complete, annotated OpenTelemetry Collector configuration for LLM observability: receiving traces over OTLP, normalizing OpenInference/OpenLLMetry schemas onto GenAI semantic conventions, redacting sensitive prompt and completion content, managing volume without sampling away conversations, exporting to Honeycomb, plus validation steps and a troubleshooting table.
Observability
The Rundeck MCP Server: AI where your Automation lives by Madeline Zemer
This blog post is part of PagerDuty’s ongoing series on how we’re helping customers navigate their journey towards autonomous operations. Read on to learn about... The post The Rundeck MCP Server: AI where your Automation lives appeared first on PagerDuty .
Observability
Find answers faster with PagerDuty Docs: one site for engineers and the AI assistants they work with by Aatharsha Jeyachelvan
This blog post is part of PagerDuty’s ongoing series on how we’re helping customers navigate their journey towards autonomous operations. Read on to learn about... The post Find answers faster with PagerDuty Docs: one site for engineers and the AI assistants they work with appeared first on PagerDuty .
Observability
Stop rewriting the same update with AI-Powered Incident Communications by Cristina Dias
This blog post is part of PagerDuty’s ongoing series on how we’re helping customers navigate their journey towards autonomous operations. Read on to learn about... The post Stop rewriting the same update with AI-Powered Incident Communications appeared first on PagerDuty .
Observability
How we replaced our host vulnerability scanner with the Datadog Agent
Learn how Datadog evaluated Agent-based host vulnerability scanning, compared detection results, and preserved coverage and audit reporting during the migration.
Observability
Elastic named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise AI Search
Elastic was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise AI Search. We ranked #1 in the AI Automation Use Case in the companion Critical Capabilities report.
Observability
A design refresh for every Dynatrace App, including yours
If Dynatrace looks different today, that’s intentional. The design refresh incorporates customer feedback to improve the user experience by reducing visual layering on page surfaces and improving contrast in dark mode. Status and chart colors are more vibrant and easier to tell apart, and charts have new themed palettes alongside the existing options. The refresh […] The post A design refresh for…
Observability
Introducing AI Evaluation: Close the Loop Across the Full AI Lifecycle
Discover New Relic AI Evaluation: Bridge pre-production prompt testing with live transaction telemetry to evaluate quality, reduce costs, and scale GenAI.
Observability
The Velocity Dilemma in Modern Software Delivery
LaunchDarkly and New Relic close the loop between release and observability, automating rollbacks before incidents reach your users.
Observability
Introducing Advanced APM: Connecting Telemetry to Business Outcomes
Eliminate diagnostic toil, catch silent performance killers before alerts fire, and align full-stack telemetry with business KPIs using Advanced APM.
Observability
New Relic Now October 2026 Round-up
See how New Relic brings trusted context, intelligence, AI, and people together to help teams understand, respond, and operate with confidence.
Observability
From Alert Configuration to Operational Intelligence: Rethinking Detection for the AI Era
See how historical telemetry can help make alerting more intelligent, consistent, and scalable while preserving engineering judgment.
Observability
Bridging the Context Gap: Pathpoint for Real-Time Business Observability
Bridge the context gap between system health and business KPIs with Pathpoint. Slash MTTR and eliminate manual translation bottlenecks.
Observability
Introducing AI Observability for OpenTelemetry
Unify OpenTelemetry AI with New Relic. Track token costs, discover shadow AI, and block prompt injections in real time without data duplication.