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Prometheus vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability 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

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
ServiceNow Cloud Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
42nd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Prometheus is 3.4%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is 0.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

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.
VinayKumar16 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides ease of use in areas like analytics and reporting
The feature of the tool that is more impactful for cloud performance stems from the area revolving around analytics and reporting. It is an easy-to-use tool. There is something known as performance analytics within ServiceNow that offers complete analytics, which offers end-to-end analytics along with the KPI metrics with what we have in place and so on. With the aforementioned aspects of the tool, I think we should be able to create a dashboard according to the operations view called the operation dashboard view, specifically for C-level executives.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Prometheus is a great solution for monitoring."
"I like its lightweight configuration functions."
"It is an efficient solution."
"The good thing is it integrates well with the Grafana dashboard. It comes with a UI where you see everything as a graph."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The dashboard is very valuable."
"It is a stable solution...Based on the feedback I have received from my colleagues in our company's IT department, the setup phase of the solution is relatively easy."
"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is the ease of pulling the metrics."
"The UI is very intuitive."
"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."
"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."
"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."
 

Cons

"Its documentation could be clearer to understand."
"Prometheus can definitely improve its visualization. For example, the matrices represented in Prometheus do not have a very good visualization on their dashboard."
"Its stability could be even better."
"The primary area where Prometheus could be improved is in terms of pricing, particularly when used with managed services."
"Prometheus requires improvement on the query side."
"If you are not quite technical, it can be pretty hard to understand the way it works and how to query data in Prometheus."
"The setup could be made easier for new users because it requires a bit of advance knowledge or experience."
"Lacks the ability to clusterize."
"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."
"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."
"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."
"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Prometheus is an open-source tool."
"The product is expensive compared to Datadog."
"My company uses the open-source version of the product."
"Prometheus is an open-source solution."
"The price of Prometheus is good, it is affordable because it is open source and there is no cost to it. You put it on your own server and the costs incurred completely depend on how you set it up."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"The solution is open source."
"This is an open-source solution."
"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Retailer
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What needs improvement with LightStep?
There are a lot of workflows and connectors. In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs.
What is your primary use case for LightStep?
I use the solution in my company since it has multiple tenants available. Basically, what happens in business is that you have a hybrid setup model, and for that, you extensively use a cloud platfo...
 

Also Known As

No data available
LightStep
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,
Find out what your peers are saying about Prometheus vs. ServiceNow Cloud Observability and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.