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Elastic Observability vs Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) 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

Elastic Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
7th
Ranking in Log Management
14th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (10th), Container Monitoring (4th)
Google Cloud's operations s...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
27th
Ranking in Log Management
30th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 3.9%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is 1.0%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Elastic Observability3.9%
Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)1.0%
Other95.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Adelina Craciun - PeerSpot reviewer
Customization enables tailored monitoring and alerting across departments
The possibility to customize it has been quite useful. Whatever the other departments want to dream up, we implement. Whatever they want to monitor, the granularity of it, the changes in the threshold, and the anomalies that they want reported all require some development. So far, every single request has been fulfilled.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I found Elk to be excellent for log analytics, security analytics, application code-level analytics, collaboration with DevOps teams, CI/CD, microservices, and Kubernetes, specifically cloud-native or cloud-specific tasks."
"The solution is open-source and helps with back-end logging. It is also easy to handle."
"Its diverse set of features available on the cloud is of significant importance."
"We can view and connect different sources to the dashboard using it."
"Machine learning is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The ability to ensure that the data is searchable and maintainable is highly valuable for our purposes."
"The solution allows us to dig deep into data."
"We use AppDynamics and Elastic. The reason why we're using Elastic APM is because of the license count. It's very favorable compared to AppDynamics. It's inexpensive; it's economical."
"Provides visibility into the performance uptime."
"Our company has a corporate account for Google Cloud and so our systems and clusters integrate really well."
"It's easy to use."
"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."
"Offers a valuable logging transport feature"
"We find the solution to be stable."
"The cloud login enables us to get our logs from the different platforms that we currently use."
 

Cons

"Elastic APM's visualization is not that great compared to other tools. It's number of metrics is very low."
"More web features could be added to the product."
"The auto-discovery isn't nearly as good. That's a big portion of it. When you drop the agent onto the JVM and you're trying to figure things out, having to go through and manually do all that is cumbersome."
"Elastic Observability is an excellent product for monitoring and visibility, but it lacks predictive analytics. Most solutions are aligned with the AIOps requirements, but this piece is missing in Elastic and should be included."
"There's a steep learning curve if you've never used this solution before."
"Elastic Observability could improve asset discovery as the current requirement to push the agent is not ideal."
"The interface could be improved."
"The only challenging aspect for new users is often writing the query language."
"It could be even more automated."
"The process of logging analytics can be improved"
"This solution could be improved if it offered the ability to analyze charts, such as a solution like Kibana."
"The logging functionality could be better."
"The product provides minimal metrics that are insufficient."
"Lacking sufficient operations documentation."
"It is difficult to estimate in advance how much something is going to cost."
"While we are satisfied with the overall performance, in certain cases we must add additional metrics and additional tools like Grafana and Dynatrace."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Users have to pay for some features, like the alerts on different channels, because they are unavailable in different source versions."
"Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay."
"The product is not that cheap."
"So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing to someone that is discussing pricing of the solution."
"There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"Elastic Observability is cheaper than other similar solutions, such as Dynatrace. Its license calculation is based on various factors like data volume and physical infrastructure, particularly related to RAM capacity."
"Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us."
"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."
"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."
"The cost could be lower."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
14%
Media Company
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
The problem is their licensing model, which is a bit confusing. Many customers struggle to understand their total cost of ownership because Elastic licensing is not dependent on easy, quantifiable ...
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
Out-of-the-box use cases have room for improvement in Elastic Observability. They don't invest a lot in building out-of-the-box observable use cases, and they are more focusing on giving a very fle...
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 advice do you have for others considering Google Stackdriver?
The Ops Agent and logging transport feature of the solution have had a major impact on improving application performance. The solution also allows the transport of logs into log buckets, which is h...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
Uber, Batterii, Q42, Dovetail Games
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Observability vs. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.