Compare Grafana vs. OpenTelemetry

Grafana Labs provides an open and composable observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. Recognized as a 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for Observability Platforms and positioned furthest to the right for Completeness of Vision, Grafana Labs supports over 25M users and 5,000+ customers. Grafana Cloud delivers the full power of Grafana’s open and composable observability stack—without the overhead of managing infrastructure. As a fully managed SaaS offering from Grafana Labs, it unifies metrics, logs, and traces in one place, giving engineering teams real-time visibility into systems and applications. Built around the LGTM Stack—Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics—Grafana Cloud provides a scalable foundation for modern observability. With built-in integrations for Kubernetes, cloud services, CI/CD pipelines, and OpenTelemetry, Grafana Cloud accelerates time to value while reducing operational complexity. Grafana Cloud also supports OLAP-style analytics through integrations with data warehouses and analytical engines like BigQuery, ClickHouse, and Druid—enabling multi-dimensional exploration across observability and business data. Teams gain access to powerful features like Adaptive Metrics for cost optimization, incident response workflows, and synthetic monitoring for performance testing—all within a secure, globally distributed platform. Whether you’re modernizing infrastructure, scaling observability, or driving SLO-based performance, Grafana Cloud delivers the insights you need—fast, flexible, and vendor-neutral.

OpenTelemetry provides high-quality, widely accessible, and portable telemetry for enhanced observability. It consists of a suite of tools, APIs, and SDKs designed to help you instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data, including metrics, logs, and traces, which are essential for evaluating your software's performance and behavior. This framework is available in multiple programming languages, making it versatile and suitable for diverse applications. You can effortlessly create and gather telemetry data from your software and services, subsequently forwarding it to various analytical tools for deeper insights. OpenTelemetry seamlessly integrates with well-known libraries and frameworks like Spring, ASP.NET Core, and Express, among others. The process of installation and integration is streamlined, often requiring just a few lines of code to get started. As a completely free and open-source solution, OpenTelemetry enjoys widespread adoption and support from major players in the observability industry, ensuring a robust community and continual improvements. This makes it an appealing choice for developers seeking to enhance their software monitoring capabilities.