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Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs Prometheus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Google Cloud's operations s...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
26th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (31st), Cloud Monitoring Software (24th)
Prometheus
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is 1.4%, down from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prometheus is 3.3%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers reliable Ops Agent and logging transport feature with easy third-party integrations
As part of our company, we implemented several changes in our log analytics pattern, including the storage and procurement process. Earlier, before implementing the solution, our company was able to procure only one year of data, but later, we came to the three-year mark. Around 15-20% reduction has been witnessed in the total analytic consumption of our company. The aforementioned result was possible because the solution allowed the creation of a dashboard where factors like storage costs, proportion of logs, and logs presence in a storage bucket or BigQuery can all be checked. Earlier all logs were stored in a raw storage, but currently our company is able to move logs in table bucket that contributes towards cost savings.
MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities
Prometheus is a scalable and flexible tool that I can deploy on any cloud platform. It is free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities. It allows me to save money by avoiding costs associated with AWS native services like CloudWatch or Amazon Prometheus. The ability to deploy on any cloud platform or environment, including Kubernetes, is a major advantage.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the multi-cloud integration, where there is support for both GCP and AWS."
"Google's technical support is very good."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its graphs - if I need any statistics, in Kubernetes or Kong level or VPN level, I can quickly get the reports."
"I like the monitoring feature."
"Our company has a corporate account for Google Cloud and so our systems and clusters integrate really well."
"Provides visibility into the performance uptime."
"Offers a valuable logging transport feature"
"We find the solution to be stable."
"Prometheus is a scalable and flexible tool that I can deploy on any cloud platform."
"It is an efficient solution."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The sky is the limit because the solution is a flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need to monitor applications."
"It has lots of APIs and libraries to integrate with any kind of language."
"The solution is useful to collect huge metrics."
"The solution helps us to scale our products and services, and it helps me by gathering those metrics."
"Prometheus gives us high availability automatically."
 

Cons

"The logging functionality could be better."
"It could be more stable."
"If I want to track any round-trip or breakdowns of my response times, I'm not able to get it. My request goes through various levels of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and comes back to my client machine. Suppose that my request has taken 10 seconds overall, so if I want to break it down, to see where the delay is happening within my architecture, I am not able to find that out using Stackdriver."
"Lacking sufficient operations documentation."
"The product provides minimal metrics that are insufficient."
"This solution could be improved if it offered the ability to analyze charts, such as a solution like Kibana."
"The process of logging analytics can be improved"
"While we are satisfied with the overall performance, in certain cases we must add additional metrics and additional tools like Grafana and Dynatrace."
"There is a need for a more comprehensive overview of exporters, especially when dealing with many of them."
"Lacks the ability to clusterize."
"If you want to collect details of metrics, you should be able to write a query for it directly. I want the product to offer better queries for the metrics."
"The initial setup of Prometheus is complex and rated one out of five in ease of setup."
"Prometheus can definitely improve its visualization. For example, the matrices represented in Prometheus do not have a very good visualization on their dashboard."
"There is a tool called Prometheus Exporter that doesn't work well."
"I would like to see improvement in the analysis tools and customization features."
"Prometheus has a learning curve when setting it up. It definitely requires a little bit more hands-on than other solutions. It is an open source solution which means you do need to go through and read the literature that they have online for setting it up. The setup could be made easier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."
"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."
"The cost could be lower."
"This is an open-source solution."
"Prometheus is an open-source tool."
"My company uses the open-source version of the product."
"The product is free."
"Prometheus is available as an open-source product."
"Prometheus is an open-source solution."
"We have the open-source version, so we don't pay for it."
"The tool is open-sourced."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Google Stackdriver?
If the errors are caught early in the interface, it would be easier for users to manage. The process of logging analytics can be improved.
What is your primary use case for Google Stackdriver?
I use the solution for logging, defining alerts, and monitoring. Our company's Java and Python logging teams mainly use it.
What do you like most about Prometheus?
The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Prometheus?
Prometheus is cost-effective for me as it is free. Using cloud-native alternatives like Amazon Prometheus would incur charges.
What is your primary use case for Prometheus?
I use Prometheus for monitoring purposes in IT infrastructure. It is particularly useful for environments using Kubernetes, as it monitors ports, containers, instances, and applications effectively.
 

Also Known As

Google Stackdriver, Stackdriver Monitoring, Stackdriver Logging, Google Cloud Monitoring
No data available
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uber, Batterii, Q42, Dovetail Games
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. Prometheus and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.