Chronosphere SaaS

Our main use case was to monitor an entire infrastructure as well as the application tech stack which we were having in a cloud environment. We had application telemetry as well, like monitoring traces, metrics, and logs. On the infrastructure side, we also monitored their metrics.

Specifically with Chronosphere, we integrated OpenTelemetry as a collector on a centralized platform and used that to divert all the telemetry logs coming from our infrastructure as well as our application into Chronosphere where we have the dashboarding done. It is best that we have alerting integrated directly into Chronosphere. This means we don't need to set up a third party alerting mechanism. Chronosphere helped us in setting up a detailed dashboard with proper filtration of the data which is coming as well as custom filtering of data traces. We set up an alert for each and every metric and trace which we wanted to monitor, which is very critical at the production level. We were based on an e-commerce platform so each and every order failure or something similar would be very crucial to us to get notified. Chronosphere helped us in setting up those alerts very quickly on a single platform instead of hopping around multiple platforms.

We integrated an entire monitoring setup. We were getting the data from OpenTelemetry collector into Chronosphere, wherein we had a centralized collector picking up the metrics and traces at different endpoints. We had dashboards created and alerting mechanisms also integrated into that, which was directly integrated into some notification mechanisms like Slack or other tools.

Specifically, we had EKS monitoring as well. We were more into a data related environment and had a big data lake setup. Chronosphere helped us in having custom automatic instrumentations which helped us to instrument our application easily and have a proper detailed monitoring setup using Chronosphere which helped us in multiple scenarios. The support team was very good for us. They had a dedicated person assigned to us who would help us very thoroughly in terms of having all the issues sorted out. We had pretty good options of monitoring multiple applications using different methods. One method is using OpenTelemetry, and we also used multiple Lake view setups. This was very useful.

There are multiple features which Chronosphere offers that I liked. A couple of features, for example, are the integration of alerting and dashboards into a single platform wherein you can easily create a dashboard and set up monitoring for that particular dashboard. You can set up particular traces of metrics based on the criticality as well as the threshold values and also custom filtration of your metrics and traces and telemetry logs. The severity and automated grouping of your coming logs based on the keyword present in it is very helpful. For example, if it is an error, it is automatically grouped. If it is some particular value we are looking at, that also helps us consolidate them. Dashboarding is very easy and the user interface is very user friendly.

We can improve a bit of UI aspects. The UI could be made more user friendly. Sometimes when identifying the specific logs patterns and identifying what metrics and what logs are coming in, going to a specific log explorer and finding it there is a little difficult. It would be very useful if we could group according to projects and have that UI a little more user friendly.

The user interface part was a bit confusing in the beginning. To make it better, I believe we would need some more open sourced or freely available courses on Chronosphere which would help us understand the platform a bit more. The team provides detailed walkthroughs whenever you get into that. However, it would be better if we could have proper video sessions or documentation which would help us understand the tool a bit more.

I have been using Chronosphere for around one and a half years.

Chronosphere is very stable.

Scalability was not an issue for us. We have it on the public cloud setup, so scalability was never a concern.

The support team was very good for us. They had a dedicated person assigned to us who would help us very thoroughly in terms of having all the issues sorted out.

Before Chronosphere, we were only handling dedicated open source alerting and monitoring mechanisms. When we moved into Chronosphere, one particular thing was that we had a beautiful support team from Chronosphere which helped us to solve a lot of our problems when we were not able to do it on the open source platforms. Integrating Chronosphere was pretty much easy coming from an open source tool and it helped us to streamline our monitoring and alerting setup across our organization, which directly impacted on the streamlining of the process as well as reducing errors and also keeping our environment uptime to a greater extent by those alerts and quick responses.

We have a dedicated team of people who are helping us from setup as well as debugging errors. Anytime you reach out to them, they help us a lot.

I would say you can accept jumping into Chronosphere if you're using an open source tool and looking to a paid solution, because it offers detailed customer support as well as a ton of features which would really help streamline your existing environment and process. It would be a great option if you're looking to make a change.

Previously we were using open source solutions like Grafana and Prometheus. The only reason was that we would have to open between too many tools for a proper detailed monitoring setup. Chronosphere helped us better. We had to introduce separate agents to pick up the metrics from applications. Logs were coming through different applications as data sources and then added into Grafana. Creating a dashboard and alerting from there was quite another tool. Grafana was the only tool we had. Once Chronosphere came in, all got consolidated.

I cannot be specific on those terms. The initial setup did take time, but once the setup was completed and we had all the environments up and running, the overall time really got saved because we had all the templates ready. We pulled in a template and created a dashboard as and when needed. We onboarded all the applications onto Chronosphere where we could monitor everything properly. There was a bit of time saved. In terms of employees, the initial setup took some time with some group of people. However, when things got easier or things got moving, we had very few employees involved into that. We were able to handle it with fewer employees.

It was pretty decent and competitive compared to the market. I didn't feel it was on the expensive side. The features and functionalities it provides, I feel the pricing is right on point.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What do you like best about the product?

Our mid-sized startup was looking for more than our hyperscaler could provide, but we knew from experience that the big dog in this space would lead to expensive, painful tradeoffs. After (skeptically) evaluating Chronosphere I am happily convinced that there is a better option. My favorite things:

* Support: knowledgeable, friendly support from day one. I assumed this was pre-contract wooing, but one year later, support is as great as ever.
* Ergonomics: tools are only useful if they're used. Their interfaces load quickly and make sense, and as a result, our engineers are happy to use them.
* Operations: the product just works; the undifferentiated heavy lifting is handled behind the scenes, without incident.
* Cost: they include tools to identify and tame anomalous and low-value data, leading to lower costs without sacrificing signal.

What do you dislike about the product?

* Learning PromQL was a little painful. However, ChatGPT is great with PromQL, and that has smoothed the learning curve for new engineers.
* Prometheus histograms are clunky. It sounds like this may be addressed soon.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Chronosphere provides our managed backend for observability (metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts). As compared with evaluated alternatives, Chronosphere provides more support, better ergonomics, and more powerful tools to control costs.

What do you like best about the product?

The ability to craft queries, ease of building dashboards and alerting

What do you dislike about the product?

The UI takes some time getting used to.

Additionally some tips for people new to using it like in AWS Cloudwatch insights would be helpful

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Observability and measuring performance of applications under varying loads

What do you like best about the product?

There are a lot of very helpful features such as muting alerts, easy to set up service accounts

What do you dislike about the product?

We recently had an outage where chronosphere wasnt reachable for 2h

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It's easy to integrate code with it to create features

What do you like best about the product?

Easy to setup and configure and easy migration of existing Prometheus resources.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nice to have cloud provider integrations.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Monitoring and alerting on infrastructure and business-critical applications.

What do you like best about the product?

Chronosphere feels like an observability product that was built for engineers and operators. After seeing costs blow up with competing products while working on observability at previous companies, it's refreshing to see a platform that puts the customer's needs first–especially with managing costs. Data generated by machines at scale can quickly and easily get out of hand, and having flexible controls makes our lives easier.

Early in the onboarding process, I was blown away when we discussed the tools available in the aggregation tier. It appeared that giving us this level of control wouldn't be good for Chronosphere's revenue in the long run, but I soon realized it's part of their philosophy and mission to give the power back to the customers. As an operator coming from an ELK-based stack (which comes with plenty of operational toils), Chronosphere is a true SaaS where you don't need to worry about the underlying storage and query infrastructure.

The profiling tools that allow you to look at incoming data at various process stages have been handy in many cases. The backend ingest and query performance have been phenomenal, especially compared to our legacy stack. Being able to use rollups to extend the retention of data will prove helpful to us in the long run, which isn't something we've been able to do effectively in our legacy stack.

Product aside, the team has been highly supportive throughout the process, from onboarding to implementation to stabilization. They've been a solid partner for the complex project of moving observability stacks within a large engineering organization.

What do you dislike about the product?

We've made good progress with the controls we've been given but still struggle with cardinality explosion on the client side and its impacts on application performance. While battle-tested in production at scale, the Prometheus client library has challenges that require attention and boundaries to prevent misuse and anti-practices. This challenge is exacerbated in large organizations where engineers have varying levels of experience with time series metrics and the concept of cardinality.

This challenge is somewhat outside of the sphere of responsibility of Chronosphere. Like the Chronosphere collector, I think there might be some opportunity for productized tooling on the library side to help solve common problems across all organizations working with Prometheus. Still, on the bright side, the team is working on backend features like the usage profiler to give us the next level of visibility.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Chronosphere is helping us collect, monitor, and visualize our application and infrastructure metrics. It allows us to use the open-source Prometheus ecosystem at scale without having to manage the backend.

What do you like best about the product?

It's very flexible and w ecan use it very easily

What do you dislike about the product?

Promql is hard to use. The query language is very difficult

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use it to monitor our services.

What do you like best about the product?

The things I appreciate the most about Chronosphere
* Built on industry standards: Prometheus and Grafana
* Uses M3DB for scalable storage
* Customer is not required to manage storage scaling, sharding, or federation
* Knowledgeable, hands-on support by account managers

What do you dislike about the product?

I honestly have experienced no downsides.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Scaling Prometheus storage beyond a single node is a pain. Chronosphere solves this by delivering a managed solution that scales, which saves the time for our Observability team.

What do you like best about the product?

Coming from a system with no metrics aggregation, Chronosphere was a breath of fresh air using the Prometheus model to scrape metrics, instantly providing aggregation of metrics and cost savings. The Chronosphere team was and continues to provide excellent support to help with migration and optimize our configuration to maximize utilization and reduce cost.

What do you dislike about the product?

There are a couple of components to cost. Data processing and data persistence. The impact of data processing cost was not realized during the POC with Chronosphere; however, the excellent support provided by Chronosphere helped us mitigate this issue.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

As our company scales, our legacy metrics system could not handle the load without aggregation. Chronosphere uses an industry-standard model(Prometheus) with aggregating metrics built in and storing metrics as time series. This makes querying the data faster compared with our legacy system and also saves us money due to the reduction of the total number of data points that persisted