Top 10 Groundcover alternatives in 2026

Groundcover is a modern, eBPF-powered observability platform designed to run entirely within your own cloud environment. While this architecture offers strong control and security benefits, it may not be the ideal choice if your requirements have evolved, especially around deployment flexibility, pricing predictability, or broader feature coverage.

Fortunately, the observability landscape is rich with mature, production-proven solutions. After evaluating dozens of platforms in real-world scenarios, I’ve narrowed the list down to 10 standout alternatives that consistently deliver across performance, reliability, and overall value.

Groundcover features

Groundcover delivers BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) observability powered by eBPF, covering infrastructure monitoring, APM, log management, real user monitoring, and LLM observability. Its host-based pricing model sets it apart from ingestion-based competitors, charging per Kubernetes node rather than per byte of data. The platform runs entirely inside your cloud, keeping all observability data private and secure within your own environment.

Top 10 Groundcover alternatives in 2026

Here's how each tool stacks up:

1. Better Stack

Better Stack matches groundcover's eBPF-powered approach while going further with a complete unified platform that covers observability, incident management, uptime monitoring, error tracking, and status pages under one roof — at significantly lower costs than most alternatives.

🌟 Key features

• eBPF-based automatic instrumentation for Kubernetes and Docker clusters with zero code changes
• ClickHouse-powered log search capable of querying billions of records in under a second
• OpenTelemetry-native distributed tracing with service maps and end-to-end request tracking
• Auto-instrumentation for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, and MongoDB
• AI SRE powered by Claude with MCP server integration for automated root cause analysis
• "Bubble up" drag-and-drop visual investigation for identifying slow requests
• Native incident management with intelligent alert grouping in Slack and Teams
• VRL and JavaScript-based data transformation pipelines with PII redaction
• Sentry-compatible error tracking at a fraction of the cost, with AI-native debugging
• Serverless ClickHouse data warehouse with an HTTP SQL API for analytical queries

➕ Pros

• Replace groundcover plus multiple separate tools with a single platform covering every observability use case
• Get 30-day log and trace retention plus 13-month metrics retention without worrying about per-signal pricing
• Add unlimited team members with full telemetry access at no extra cost
• Control spending dynamically with remotely adjustable sampling, compression, and batching before data hits billing
• Run arbitrary SQL queries against your own telemetry via the warehouse HTTP API
• Try it risk-free with a 60-day money-back guarantee

➖ Cons

• BYOC deployment mode is not yet available, so your data lives in Better Stack's managed cloud

Product walkthroughs

Better Stack Collector Collect logs, traces, and metrics from your clusters with zero code changes using eBPF and auto-instrumentation.

AI SRE Demo Investigate, debug, and resolve incidents using AI SRE.

Explore Traces Visualize and analyze distributed OpenTelemetry traces.

💲 Pricing

It starts with a free plan at $0 per month, perfect for personal projects. You get 10 monitors and heartbeats, 1 status page, Slack and email alerts, 100,000 exceptions per month, plus logs, metrics, and web events included.

If you find that you need more, paid plans begin at $29 per month, which includes a single on-call responder with unlimited phone call alerts and access to the full platform. You can then scale responders at $29 per license, while team members remain unlimited at no extra cost.

2. Dynatrace

Dynatrace competes directly with groundcover's eBPF-powered automation story, using its OneAgent technology to automatically discover and instrument your entire environment with minimal manual effort.

🌟 Key features

• Davis AI that automatically identifies root causes and correlates problems across your stack
• OneAgent technology that monitors infrastructure, applications, and user experience automatically
• Smartscape topology maps that show real-time relationships between all monitored entities
• Deep Kubernetes and microservices monitoring with automatic service detection
• Built-in application security with runtime vulnerability detection and threat analysis
• Business analytics that connect technical performance metrics to actual business outcomes
• Live debugger that surfaces code-level insights without redeployment
• OpenTelemetry ingestion alongside proprietary instrumentation for hybrid setups

➕ Pros

• Automate the bulk of setup and ongoing maintenance with OneAgent — similar to groundcover's zero-instrumentation promise
• Get AI-driven root cause analysis rather than raw dashboards and alerts
• Scale confidently across large, complex enterprise environments spanning multiple clouds
• Protect applications with built-in security monitoring layered on top of observability
• Rely on a battle-tested platform running at Fortune 500 scale

➖ Cons

• Costs significantly more than groundcover at scale, with complex per-host and per-feature pricing
• Vendor lock-in is a real concern given how deeply OneAgent integrates into your infrastructure
• Overkill for smaller teams or simpler Kubernetes environments

💲 Pricing

Dynatrace uses consumption-based pricing across multiple modules. Infrastructure monitoring starts around $0.04 per hour per host, with APM and full-stack monitoring costing more. Enterprise contracts are available for large-scale deployments. There is no meaningful free tier.

3. New Relic

New Relic offers a mature, full-stack observability platform with strong APM roots and a genuinely useful free tier that makes it accessible for teams evaluating alternatives to groundcover's host-based model.

🌟 Key features

• Deep APM with code-level performance profiling across dozens of languages and frameworks
• Infrastructure monitoring with detailed host, container, and cloud service metrics
• Distributed tracing that links requests across services with full context
• Log management with automatic correlation to traces and infrastructure metrics
• CodeStream integration that surfaces production telemetry directly inside your IDE
• AI-powered anomaly detection with predictive alerting before issues escalate
• Mobile crash analysis for iOS and Android applications
• Real user monitoring and synthetic transaction testing for digital experience insights

➕ Pros

• Start for free with 100GB of data per month included — groundcover has no equivalent ingest-based free tier
• Get deep APM capabilities that go beyond what groundcover's infrastructure-first approach covers
• Instrument your stack with strong OpenTelemetry support alongside native agents
• Bring telemetry into your development workflow through IDE integrations
• Monitor mobile applications natively alongside web and infrastructure

➖ Cons

• Costs rise quickly as data volume and feature usage increase beyond the free tier
• Ingestion-based pricing becomes difficult to predict at scale
• The platform's breadth can be overwhelming if you're coming from groundcover's cleaner, more focused interface

💲 Pricing

New Relic offers 100GB of free data ingestion per month plus one full-platform user. Beyond that, pricing is $0.35 per GB ingested for core data and $0.55/GB for extended retention. Full-platform user seats start at $549/month each. Enterprise plans are available.

4. Datadog

Datadog is the most feature-complete observability platform on the market, covering everything from infrastructure to security to LLM observability. Its breadth goes far beyond groundcover's current scope.

🌟 Key features

• Infrastructure and APM monitoring across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments
• Over 800 integrations covering virtually every tool in the modern stack
• Watchdog AI that automatically surfaces anomalies and potential root causes
• Real user monitoring and synthetic testing for end-to-end digital experience visibility
• Cloud SIEM and threat detection layered directly onto your observability data
• LLM observability for monitoring AI application costs, latency, and quality
• Log management with pattern detection, rehydration, and flexible retention tiers
• Bits AI for automated incident investigation and resolution workflows

➕ Pros

• Get the broadest feature set in the market — if it exists in observability, Datadog probably does it
• Handle any scale of enterprise workload across global, multi-cloud deployments
• Access hundreds of pre-built integrations without custom instrumentation work
• Enforce fine-grained access controls and audit logging for compliance-heavy environments

➖ Cons

• Bills are notoriously unpredictable and can spike sharply as you add hosts, metrics, or products
• Custom metrics pricing is particularly painful for high-cardinality Kubernetes environments
• There is no meaningful free tier for production workloads

💲 Pricing

Datadog charges per host for infrastructure ($23/host/month), per GB for logs, and per million spans for APM, with custom metrics billed separately. A 1TB/month setup comparable to groundcover's medium-scale benchmark can easily exceed $50,000/month. Enterprise discounts are available through annual contracts.

5. Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud builds on the industry's most popular visualization layer to offer a fully managed observability stack that covers metrics, logs, traces, and incident management without requiring you to run your own infrastructure.

🌟 Key features

• Industry-leading dashboards and visualizations with an extensive plugin ecosystem
• Native Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo support covering the full LGTM observability stack
• Strong OpenTelemetry integration with standards-compliant data ingestion
• Grafana OnCall for incident response with escalation rules and on-call scheduling
• Application performance monitoring with service maps and dependency tracking
• Grafana 12 observability-as-code with Git integration for dashboard version control
• Machine learning-powered anomaly detection and automated root cause surfacing
• Kubernetes monitoring with pre-built dashboards for cluster and workload visibility

➕ Pros

• Build the best dashboards in the industry using Grafana's unmatched visualization capabilities
• Avoid vendor lock-in through deep commitment to open source standards and formats
• Choose between fully managed cloud and self-hosted deployment depending on your data residency needs
• Access a large community ecosystem with thousands of pre-built dashboards and plugins
• Get predictable, usage-based pricing that scales more transparently than groundcover's per-node model for variable workloads

➖ Cons

• Coordinating Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo as separate systems adds operational complexity versus groundcover's unified approach
• PromQL and LogQL have learning curves that can slow down onboarding for teams without prior Grafana experience
• No eBPF-powered auto-instrumentation — you need to configure agents and exporters manually

💲 Pricing

Grafana Cloud has a free tier covering 50GB of logs, 10K series for metrics, and 50GB of traces per month. The Pro plan starts at $0 with pay-as-you-go pricing: $0.50/GB for logs, $8 per 1,000 active series for metrics, and $0.50/GB for traces. Advanced plans with enterprise features require contacting sales.

6. SigNoz

SigNoz is an open-source observability platform that shares groundcover's philosophy of keeping data in your own infrastructure, while offering full code transparency and a self-hosted deployment path with no licensing fees.

🌟 Key features

• Fully open-source codebase with complete visibility into how your data is processed
• OpenTelemetry-native architecture with first-class support for all three signal types
• Correlated metrics, logs, and traces in a unified interface without jumping between tools
• ClickHouse-powered backend for fast, cost-efficient query performance at scale
• Self-hosted deployment that gives you complete data sovereignty and privacy control
• Streamlined setup designed for rapid deployment with minimal operational overhead
• Exception monitoring with stack traces linked directly to distributed traces

➕ Pros

• Eliminate vendor licensing fees entirely — pay only for your own infrastructure and compute
• Own your data completely with no telemetry leaving your environment
• Benefit from transparent, community-driven development with an active contributor base
• Query fast even at scale thanks to ClickHouse's columnar storage architecture
• Inspect every line of code to understand exactly what the platform does with your data

➖ Cons

• You take on full responsibility for installation, upgrades, scaling, and ongoing maintenance
• No managed hosted option if you want the open-source version without the operational burden
• AI-powered features, advanced enterprise controls, and support SLAs require the cloud or enterprise tiers

💲 Pricing

The open-source version is free with no restrictions — you just pay for your own infrastructure. SigNoz Cloud starts at $199/month and includes managed hosting. Enterprise pricing is available for large-scale deployments requiring dedicated support and advanced compliance features.

7. Honeycomb

Honeycomb takes a fundamentally different approach to observability, specializing in high-cardinality event analysis that enables deep exploratory debugging of complex distributed systems.

🌟 Key features

• High-cardinality data analysis across millions of unique dimension combinations without performance degradation
• Powerful query builder designed specifically for exploratory root cause investigation
• BubbleUp that automatically surfaces correlations between system behavior and performance anomalies
• Distributed tracing with automatic service dependency discovery
• SLO monitoring with error budget tracking and burn rate alerts
• Structured event data that delivers richer debugging context than traditional time-series metrics
• Team collaboration features with shared query history and annotated incident timelines
• OpenTelemetry ingestion with strong standards compliance

➕ Pros

• Debug high-cardinality, complex distributed systems with capabilities that few platforms match
• Move quickly during incidents with an intuitive query interface designed for rapid exploration
• Get richer context from structured events than you would from aggregated metrics alone
• Work with a developer-friendly platform designed around how software engineers actually debug problems

➖ Cons

• Focuses primarily on application observability — infrastructure monitoring is limited compared to groundcover
• No eBPF auto-instrumentation; you need to add SDK instrumentation to your application code
• Higher learning curve if you're accustomed to traditional dashboards and metrics-first monitoring

💲 Pricing

Honeycomb offers a free tier covering 20 million events per month. The Team plan is $130/month for up to 1.5 billion events. Pro and Enterprise plans are volume-based with custom pricing. All plans include unlimited team members.

8. AppSignal

AppSignal prioritizes developer experience above all else, offering a clean and focused APM platform that trades groundcover's infrastructure-first depth for simplicity and fast time-to-value.

🌟 Key features

• Application performance monitoring with error tracking and detailed transaction traces
• Custom metrics and flexible dashboard creation without complex configuration
• Host metrics monitoring for basic infrastructure visibility alongside APM data
• Magic dashboards that automatically organize application metrics on first install
• Anomaly detection that flags unusual patterns without requiring manual threshold setup
• Uptime monitoring with global check locations and alert notifications
• Deep integrations with Ruby on Rails, Elixir, Node.js, and Python frameworks
• Team collaboration with shared dashboards, alerts, and notification routing

➕ Pros

• Get up and running in minutes with automatic instrumentation for supported frameworks
• Benefit from pricing that stays transparent and predictable as your application grows
• Use a clean interface designed for developers rather than operations teams
• Access documentation and support that are consistently praised across the developer community
• Avoid the complexity of enterprise-grade observability platforms when you don't need it

➖ Cons

• Infrastructure monitoring depth is limited compared to groundcover's Kubernetes-native approach
• No eBPF instrumentation — you depend on language-level agents
• Complex distributed tracing scenarios and microservice-heavy architectures stretch the platform's limits

💲 Pricing

AppSignal pricing is based on the number of hosts and app dyno hours. Plans start at $18/month for a single host with one app. Team plans start at $83/month. Enterprise pricing scales with usage and includes premium support. A 30-day free trial is available.

9. Logz.io

Logz.io delivers a managed observability platform built on open-source foundations — Elasticsearch, Prometheus, and Jaeger — making it a strong choice for teams that want familiar tooling without the operational burden of running it themselves.

🌟 Key features

• Centralized log management with Elasticsearch-powered search and analytics
• Infrastructure and application metrics monitoring using managed Prometheus
• Distributed tracing with Jaeger for full microservices request visibility
• Cloud SIEM for security monitoring, threat detection, and compliance reporting
• AI-powered anomaly detection with automated alerting on unusual patterns
• Kubernetes monitoring with specialized dashboards and cluster health alerts
• Multi-cloud support spanning AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform
• Pre-built dashboards and alert rules for common infrastructure and application stacks

➕ Pros

• Work with familiar open-source tools in a managed environment — no infrastructure to maintain
• Get comprehensive observability across logs, metrics, and traces in one managed platform
• Add cloud SIEM for security monitoring without a separate tool
• Scale quickly with cloud-native architecture and dedicated account support

➖ Cons

• Different signals often live in separate interfaces, requiring context switching between logs, metrics, and traces
• Teams unfamiliar with Elasticsearch and Prometheus face a steeper learning curve
• Less cohesive than groundcover's fully unified experience

💲 Pricing

Logz.io uses volume-based pricing across its log management, infrastructure monitoring, and distributed tracing modules. Pricing starts at around $0.96 per GB of logs ingested, with separate pricing for metrics and traces. Enterprise plans with dedicated support and advanced compliance features are available through direct sales.

10. Dash0

Dash0 is an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform built on CNCF open standards, offering a clean alternative to groundcover with transparent data-volume-based pricing and strong resource-centric monitoring.

🌟 Key features

• OpenTelemetry-native observability covering metrics, logs, traces, resources, and dashboards
• Resource-centric monitoring that puts your infrastructure at the center of observability data
• Built on CNCF open standards including Prometheus and Grafana for long-term compatibility
• Transparent pricing based on data volume rather than per-host or per-seat fees
• Alert management and dashboard tooling included without additional module costs
• AI-powered triage capabilities for faster incident resolution
• Direct compatibility with existing OpenTelemetry collectors and SDKs

➕ Pros

• Get predictable costs based on the data you actually send rather than host count
• Benefit from strong OpenTelemetry compatibility without proprietary agent lock-in
• Work with familiar CNCF-standard tooling and visualization layers
• Start quickly with a 14-day free trial to validate the platform against your real workloads

➖ Cons

• No eBPF-powered auto-instrumentation — you still need to configure and deploy agents
• Newer platform with a smaller ecosystem and community than more established alternatives
• Less comprehensive than groundcover for pure infrastructure and Kubernetes-native monitoring use cases

💲 Pricing

Dash0 prices based on data volume ingested. For 1TB of traces and 1TB of logs per month, costs run approximately $920/month. A 14-day free trial is available. There is no permanently free tier.

Final thoughts

If groundcover no longer fits your needs, Better Stack is the top alternative. It matches groundcover's eBPF-powered zero-instrumentation approach, dramatically simplifies your tooling by consolidating observability, incident management, error tracking, and uptime monitoring into one platform, and does all of it at a fraction of what most alternatives cost at comparable data volumes.

For teams with hard data residency requirements where everything must stay inside their own cloud, SigNoz is the best open-source self-hosted option, and Dynatrace is the strongest fully managed alternative with comparable automation depth.

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