Observability / APM

Elastic Stack (ELK)

Elastic N.V.

Observability + logs + search built on the Elasticsearch engine — strong if you already run Elastic and want APM + metrics on the same store.

Category
Observability / APM
License
Open core
Deployment
SaaS or self-hosted
Cost
Medium
Free tier
Yes
Self-host effort
Heavy
Maturity
Incumbent
Popularity
≈73k GitHub stars (Elasticsearch)

The catch

Resource-based pricing and the multi-license maze (AGPL/ELv2/SSPL) are confusing; great at logs/search, but APM and metrics can feel bolted onto a search engine, and retention costs balloon.

Monitors

ServersMetricsLogsTracesSyntheticsSecurityK8sCloud

Capabilities

AlertingDashboardsDistributed tracingRBACAPI

Built for

Mid-marketEnterpriseSRE / DevOps

First-hand data

data as of Jun 24, 2026

Significant incidents · 90d
2221 major · 1 minor
Incident-minutes logged
6.4 dayscumulative, not downtime
Last incident
Jun 17, 2026

Polled first-hand from each vendor's public status page & GitHub. "Significant" excludes informational notices & planned maintenance; incident-minutes sum per-incident durations (not platform downtime). Method & full data →

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