Arize vs. Grafana Cloud

Grafana vs Arize AX: AI agent observability compared

Grafana Cloud is an observability platform that connects AI agent conversations and evaluations to the metrics, logs, and traces behind your services. Arize AX is a platform for agent tracing, evaluations, prompt management, and issue detection. Use Grafana Cloud to follow an agent failure back to the service behind it. See how they compare.

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Follow the tool call where an agent went wrong

Open the trace behind a conversation to inspect tool calls, errors, and time spent in each step.

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Get alerted on agent problems

Set alerts on thresholds for agent errors, latency, estimated cost, or evaluation scores using Grafana Alerting.

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Check a change before release

Run the same test suite against two agent versions and compare scores, cost, and linked traces.

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Ask Assistant to inspect a failure

Find failed model calls and inspect their captured inputs and tool results. Ask Assistant to help create an evaluation for that behavior.

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Comparing Grafana Cloud vs. Arize

Capabilities
 Grafana Cloud
Arize AX
What you investigate
 Grafana Cloud
Agent conversations linked to traces, alongside service metrics and logs. Reduce mean time to resolution by connecting AI failures to the services and dependencies that caused them.
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Arize AX
AX traces model, retrieval, and tool operations; it also provides production monitors.
OpenTelemetry support
 Grafana Cloud
The Agent Observability SDK emits OpenTelemetry traces and metrics, plus a separate generation-data export. You can also send compatible generative AI spans without the SDK; OpenTelemetry ingestion is in public preview.
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Arize AX
Uses OpenTelemetry and OpenInference attributes, exported through OTLP.
Optimize cost and performance
 Grafana Cloud
Agent Observability estimates the cost of every generation from its token usage and a price for the model that served it. By default, it uses public list prices from the model card catalog. If you pay a different negotiated price, set your own price for that model.
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Arize AX
You can add new cost tracking or edit cloned defaults to apply negotiated discounts or create tiered pricing cost configs for volume-based tiered pricing.
Evaluation & experiments
 Grafana Cloud

Score live traffic with online evaluations, including built-in safety and secret-detection templates, and alert on score drops. Compare agent versions before release with offline experiments you run yourself, including from CI.

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Arize AX

Online evaluations on traces and offline dataset/experiment comparisons, including runs wired into CI/CD.

Prompt versioning

 Grafana Cloud

Tracks agent versions and prompt changes reported by your instrumentation (or derived from the system prompt) and compares quality, cost, and latency across versions.

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Arize AX

Prompt Hub saves each prompt change as an immutable, versioned Prompt Object, and versions can be diffed.

Dashboards & alerts
 Grafana Cloud
Built-in dashboards and Grafana alerts for agent metrics.
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Arize AX
Custom metrics and monitors with static or automatic thresholds and notifications.
Usage and billing
 Grafana Cloud
Bills model calls as generations, which is one model call made by your agent, plus evaluation/guard tokens and telemetry.
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Arize AX
AX plans set span-volume, ingestion, retention, and Signal limits. Model-cost tracking is a separate view of your application spend.
Ecosystem & integrations
 Grafana Cloud
SDKs for Go, Python, TypeScript, Java, and .NET; integrations include LangChain, LangGraph, OpenAI Agents, and Vercel AI SDK.
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Arize AX
Automatic integrations and manual OTel instrumentation; OpenInference supplies AI-specific attributes.
AI-assisted investigation
 Grafana Cloud
Assistant can inspect calls and help configure evaluations. Alert Enrichment can start an investigation, call an external service, or query a Grafana data source when an alert fires.
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Arize AX
Alyx helps investigate and edit. Signal scans traces for recurring issues; repository-backed fixes and pull requests require Enterprise.
Hosting
 Grafana Cloud
Agent Observability runs in Grafana Cloud. Setup requires enabling it on a Cloud stack.
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Arize AX
AX offers managed SaaS and Enterprise self-hosting; Phoenix can also be operated in production.
Setup
 Grafana Cloud
Install the gcx plugin, then use its agento11y-instrument skill to instrument your app and send generations to Agent Observability. The skill verifies that data lands in Grafana Cloud.
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Arize AX
Send OTel spans with OpenInference attributes for AI-specific views.

Grafana Labs: A Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms

Gartner evaluated 19 vendors based on their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision, and Grafana Labs was positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision.

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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms, Padraig Byrne, Pankaj Prasad, Martin Caren, D.B. Cummings, Tanmay Bisht, July 2026.

Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are a trademark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Grafana Labs.

Start with one agent

Start with one agent

Enable Agent Observability, configure generation export and tracing, then verify one conversation and its linked trace.

Plan what moves

Before switching, decide how to retain prompts, evaluations, datasets, and history.

Try Agent Observability with your own agent.

See how Grafana Cloud connects agent conversations with the services behind them.

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Grafana vs Arize: AI Agent Observability Compared | Grafana Labs