groundcover vs. Grafana Cloud

Compare groundcover vs. Grafana Cloud 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.

groundcover and Grafana Cloud 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.

groundcover vs. Grafana Cloud at a glance

groundcover
Grafana Cloud
BYOC (Data Residency, Compliance, Security)
On Prem (Data Residency, Compliance, Security)
with Grafana OSS only
Correlation between logs, metrics, traces
Kubernetes native
Limited
Full HTTP Payloads of Request as well as response including headers
Smart Sampling

groundcover vs. Grafana Cloud at a glance

groundcover
Grafana Cloud
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)

groundcover vs. Grafana Cloud at a glance

groundcover
Grafana Cloud
All data types included in standard plan
APM, Logs, LLM, RUM, Infrastructure Monitoring all sold separately
No Ingestion based pricing
No ingestion based fees (ingestion depends on own storage)
Additional costs based on retention
No retention pricing. Keep as much as you want
Costs increase when retention policies applied
Additional costs for indexed data
All data is indexed at no additional costs
Additional price bands for hot/cold storage
Out of the box LLM Observability (tokens, hallucinations, drift)
No Additional Cost
(Manual instrumentation is possible and charges will apply)
RUM
No Additional Cost
(Additional charges are incurred by sessions)

groundcover overview

groundcover is a full-stack observability platform that goes beyond traditional SaaS limitations by giving teams complete control of their telemetry in their own cloud. It delivers APM, log management, infrastructure monitoring, LLM observability, and Real User Monitoring (RUM) in a single, unified solution — all with zero instrumentation, powered by eBPF.

With a BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) model, groundcover eliminates SaaS markups and data tradeoffs, providing complete visibility, infinite retention, and flat, predictable pricing. From infrastructure to applications to Agentic Application workloads, groundcover captures every signal — without sampling or rate limits — and keeps it private and secure inside your VPC. Whether running in the cloud, on-prem, or in regulated environments, groundcover gives engineering teams operational simplicity, cost clarity, and observability that just works, without compromise.

Grafana Cloud overview

Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform that brings together metrics, logs, and traces using open-source projects such as Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, and Mimir. It provides dashboards, alerting, and analytics in a single hosted service, removing the need for teams to deploy and manage their own observability stack. The platform supports infrastructure, application, and Kubernetes monitoring, with prebuilt dashboards and integrations for more than 100 external data sources. Additional capabilities include performance testing with Grafana k6, incident management with Grafana Incident and Grafana OnCall, and AI-powered features like anomaly detection and metric forecasting. Grafana Cloud is used by teams that want to standardize on open-source observability tools while offloading the operational overhead of running them at scale.

Top 8 Observability Tools for 2025: Go from Data to Action

Discover top 8 observability tools for 2025. Explore open-source options and learn when choosing proprietary solutions might better fit your needs and goals.

Compare groundcover with others

vs.

Start monitoring,
everything.

Deploy groundcover on your environment in minutes,
or explore it on our data before lighting up your own cluster.