Dynatrace vs. Chronosphere

Compare Dynatrace vs. Chronosphere for Observability. We want you to choose the most suitable tool for your use case, even if it’s not us.

As cloud-native environments continue to grow in complexity, observability has become essential for ensuring the reliability, performance, and scalability of modern applications. From monitoring infrastructure health, enabling deep visibility into distributed systems, or getting real-time insights into reasoning paths, token usage of LLM Agentic applications. However, traditional vendors sliced visibility into separate products (APM, Log Management, Infrastructure Monitoring, LLM Observability) and priced them in ways that forced tradeoffs making it important for team to choosing the right observability platform is critical to operational success.

Dynatrace and Chronosphere each bring unique strengths to observability, with distinct capabilities and trade-offs. The best fit depends on your organization’s priorities—whether that’s cost efficiency, deployment flexibility, developer experience, or ecosystem integrations.

The right choice depends on your priorities: cost, control, scale, and flexibility. In the following sections, we’ll compare both platforms to help you determine which best fits your needs, even if the answer isn’t us.

Dynatrace vs. Chronosphere at a glance

Dynatrace
Chronosphere
BYOC (Data Residency, Compliance, Security)
On Prem (Data Residency, Compliance, Security)
Correlation between logs, metrics, traces
Limited to Kubernetes only
Kubernetes native
Limited
Limited
Full HTTP Payloads of Request as well as response including headers
eBPF for Sensors
Smart Sampling

Dynatrace vs. Chronosphere at a glance

Dynatrace
Chronosphere
RBAC for user roles
RBAC for Pages
RBAC for Actions
Fine-grain access control to data/resources (namespace setup support) to provide access to specific teams or by data type (MELT)

Dynatrace vs. Chronosphere at a glance

Dynatrace
Chronosphere
All data types included in standard plan
APM, Logs, LLM, RUM, Infrastructure Monitoring all sold separately
No Ingestion based pricing
Additional costs based on retention
Costs increase when retention policies applied
Costs increase when retention policies applied
Additional costs for indexed data
Additional price bands for hot/cold storage
Additional price bands for hot/cold storage
Out of the box LLM Observability (tokens, hallucinations, drift)
(Requires the installation of an additional agent; token count only)
No Additional Cost
(Manual instrumentation is possible and charges will apply)
RUM
RUM No Additional Cost
(Additional charges are incurred by events + sessions)

Dynatrace overview

Dynatrace is a software-intelligence platform that provides observability, automation, and security for cloud environments. It offers application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, digital experience monitoring (DEM), log management, application security, and AIOps in a single system. Dynatrace uses a single agent, called OneAgent, to automatically instrument applications, services, and infrastructure. Its Smartscape technology maps dependencies across environments, while the Davis AI engine analyzes telemetry to detect anomalies, identify root causes, and trigger automated responses. The platform also includes Grail, a data lakehouse designed for storing and analyzing observability and security data with contextual insights. Organizations use Dynatrace to monitor complex IT environments, reduce time to resolution, and automate operational tasks across the software delivery lifecycle.

Chronosphere overview

Chronosphere is a cloud-native observability platform built to help engineering teams manage the scale, complexity, and cost of modern applications. It provides visibility across infrastructure, applications, and business metrics, giving DevOps and SRE teams the ability to detect and resolve issues before they impact users. By centralizing telemetry data and offering tools like Chronosphere Lens, it helps organizations reduce noise, improve reliability, and boost developer productivity.

Purpose-built for the demands of cloud-native environments, Chronosphere helps customers lower the cost of ingesting telemetry by giving user access to smart tools to optimize which data they keep and where they store it. Fluent Bit–based telemetry pipeline, and focus on flexibility help teams control data growth without sacrificing insight.

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