# Chronosphere Reviews **Vendor:** Palo Alto Networks **Category:** [Observability Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/observability-software) **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 20 ## About Chronosphere Chronosphere is the only observability platform that puts you back in control by taming rampant data growth and cloud-native complexity, delivering increased business confidence. Chronosphere is an efficient, reliable and flexible SaaS solution, built for scaling cloud-native engineering organizations. Teams at startups to well-known global brands in the Fortune 500 around the world trust Chronosphere to help them operate scalable, highly available, and resilient applications. The Chronosphere platform can ingest metrics and distributed trace data in a variety of open source formats, allowing you to leverage existing observability investments for greater speed and flexibility. ## Chronosphere Reviews ### 1. An exceptional, pragmatic observability platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Health, Wellness and Fitness | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2023 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** 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 Chronosphere?** * 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 Chronosphere 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. ### 2. A great tool for metrics at scale **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alec L. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 16, 2023 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** Aggregation rules are fantastic, especially if you run a large fleet (for example, aggregating away the instance/pod labels from histograms on ingest makes them much cheaper to store). Drop rules are a lifesaver when someone adds a bad metric and you need to stop it ASAP. Their internal observability tooling is great. Their profiler is excellent for discovering cost-saving opportunities (by adding aggregation or drop rules). They also provide out-of-the-box dashboards for understanding how you are using the system, which helps answer questions like "how much of my limit is being used by job X?" Extremely fast to query. Very easy to onboard if you're already using Prometheus. The chronosphere collector is mostly compatible with existing Prometheus configs, and their frontend can import any of your existing Grafana dashboards. Wonderful support. The Chronosphere team has been fantastic, not just during the implementation phase but also afterward. They've also been great at surfacing non-obvious issues to us in places where they haven't quite automated everything yet (for example, misconfigured notifiers and alerts). **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** Prometheus/PromQL (which Chronosphere is based on) is still a complex system to learn. If you're already using it, Chronosphere is a fantastic drop-in replacement for Prometheus. However, if you or your users are new, expect to take some time learning the language and data model. If you don't know what you're doing, it's easy to make a query that looks mostly right but isn't quite. **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chronosphere has allowed us to monitor our applications and infrastructure at scale. ### 3. A necessary, scalable observability platform run by a stellar team **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arjun N. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 16, 2023 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** 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 Chronosphere?** 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 Chronosphere 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. ### 4. Chronosphere is a company that helps you walk through the complexity of Observability **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hashim C. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2023 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** 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 Chronosphere?** 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 Chronosphere 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 ### 5. Overall nice platform for alerting and visualizing metrics **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nick T. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 10, 2023 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** - Excellent customer support and engagement, quickly addressing any friction we encountered. - Terraform provider, Chronoctl, and overall resource management experience - Query builder tool is useful when debugging PromQL queries - Explorer window allows you to overlay results from multiple queries, which is helpful when debugging and creating new PromQL queries. - Filtering Alerts on what's currently firing **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** - The interface is challenging to use on mobile. - Specific UI components don't act as you initially expect them to. **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a place to send application and infrastructure metrics that reliably sends alerts when something falls out of the "normal" range. As a platform, Chronosphere has filled that gap in our observability toolkit. ### 6. Scalable metrics storage with M3DB **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jeff G. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 23, 2023 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** 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 Chronosphere?** I honestly have experienced no downsides. **What problems is Chronosphere 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. ### 7. Chronosphere as Observability **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shailendra L. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 20, 2023 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** Easy to setup and configure and easy migration of existing Prometheus resources. **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** Nice to have cloud provider integrations. **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** Monitoring and alerting on infrastructure and business-critical applications. ### 8. Chronosphere review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rohit A. | Engineering Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** Monitoring Dashboards. Ability to set alerting via code and integrations to pagerduty. Service accounts for different deployments. **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** Integration with AWS Lambdas. Needs logging functionality as well to correlate with metrics **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** Getting observability data and set alerting ### 9. Review from Kevin **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kevin Z. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 03, 2023 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** It's very flexible and w ecan use it very easily **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** Promql is hard to use. The query language is very difficult **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use it to monitor our services. ### 10. Great custom service and product! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rajan P. | DevOps Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2022 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** 1. Simplicity in on-boarding 2. Integration with Grafana open-source, Prometheus libraries isolating vendor-specific tools 3. Customer services and on-boarding help **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** 1. Chronosphere is a great product for Prometheus metrics but had a few issues related to carbon metrics query performance, and time bucketing. But all these were resolved as a part of on-boarding process **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1. One metrics solution based on an open-source framework that can work for different tech stacks/ brands for a conglomerate company with diverse needs 2. Highly scalable at best price in the market 3. Custom support is great too 4. Probably the only solution that offers native Prometheus experience along with compatibility with legacy systems such as Graphite ### 11. Overall positive, but could use some quality-of-life improvements **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 01, 2022 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** The core product is solid: metrics dashboard, alerts are reliable overall. Our team agreed that it gets the job done. It also supports both Prometheus style pull metric and statsd style push metrics. **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** 1. lack of support for customer-facing dashboards 2. documentation is overly simplified. It also lacked search functionality for the longest time. Recently the team added search, but it still has some usability issues 3. testing functionalities are missing. I can't do alert backtesting or notifier testing. 4. Eng team of chronosphere pushes a couple of requests that require code changes or manual operations each year. This was more than what we hoped for. **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chronosphere provides a scalable solution on top of the widely adopted Prometheus-Grafana suite. The core product (time series/alerts) is capable and reliable. We can just set&forget for the most part. ### 12. A solid observability service **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 25, 2023 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** The ability to craft queries, ease of building dashboards and alerting **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** 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 Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** Observability and measuring performance of applications under varying loads ### 13. Many features **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 25, 2023 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** There are a lot of very helpful features such as muting alerts, easy to set up service accounts **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** We recently had an outage where chronosphere wasnt reachable for 2h **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's easy to integrate code with it to create features ### 14. Great product with even better service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Real Estate | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 22, 2022 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** The product accepts large volumes of traffic with high uptime. The support staff is VERY attentive and responsive to questions and inquiries much faster than typical vendors we deal with. They also regularly follow up on issues to ensure everything is resolved. **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** Some aspects of their product are still under development, with APIs and interfaces changing occasionally. Though they give plenty of notice to these changes, they can be a headache. **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** They save us countless hours of having to run and maintain our own metrics platform. It allows us to focus on aspects of the business that are most important to us. ### 15. reliable, easy to setup and operate, great support team **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 12, 2022 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** - Great support team: engineers and account managers are super quick to respond and always willing to lend a helping hand. Also very receptive to feedback and proactive with their communication (e.g. "we noticed X about your system, would you like to do Y?") - Excellent reliability: we've experienced very few issues with chronosphere so far, none of which have been more than a tiny blip. Among the few we were able to quickly diagnose them and come to resolutions. **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** Lack of UI components: there are still certain features being built out that would be nice to have a UI component for, such as rollup rules. The team is aware of this and is actively developing. **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chronosphere has made metrics storage, querying, and alerting a very smooth and painless experience for our team. And the fact that we're not paying an exorbitant amount for this service is just magnificent. ### 16. Chronosphere is Stable, Fast and cost effective at scale **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Charlie P. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 18, 2022 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** ChronoSphere has been an effective replacement for Prometheus like backends like Cortex. It is fast, stable and scales with our needs. **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** I wish it had the capabilities to back fill data, but I believe its down to the limitations of M3DB and the way they compress blocks **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** Scalability of the metric system in a cost effective way is what benefits us most ### 17. It is awesome product with open source compatibility **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Real Estate | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 01, 2022 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** Compatibility with Prometheus and Grafana **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** Query lowness however I understand the limitation of time series database. **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** Chronosphere is solving the Obserrvability problem in a cost-optimized way. ### 18. overall good experience for visualize the metrics, dashboards and alerts. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 10, 2022 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** - easy to check the alerts. - profiler for checking metrics using regex - provide suggestions about promql function that can be used in the query - metrics optimization dashboards **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** - apply changes in the panel and need to save again - do not like the concept of buckets - profiler search can not share - dashboards are slow to load **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** - terraform provider for applying alerts - rollup rules for metrics aggregation ### 19. Great service for monitoring aspects of Observability **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Sports | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 19, 2022 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** Integration of Tracing is incredibly useful with live investigations and not having to roll our own solution for it. **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** It feels a bit like a reskin of Grafana. **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** Takes the hassle out of hosting our own observability platform ### 20. Amazing! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Food & Beverages | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2022 **What do you like best about Chronosphere?** Its improved a lot since a year ago. Chronosphere has helped us centralize and track all of our services metrics in one place, with autocomplete querying and avoiding lag spikes we get from using other metric software **What do you dislike about Chronosphere?** Performance on the website used to be very slow in autocompletion, but happy to report that that issue has been remediated **What problems is Chronosphere solving and how is that benefiting you?** Faster metrics - [View Chronosphere pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/chronosphere/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-13+11%3A22%3A25+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=f5653bff-ec3f-4cab-93e9-ccca4c2c611c&secure%5Btoken%5D=fbd7368cd074d04a7db786c59be64d630571bb8eaa519a73ecea6953b297c8f5&format=llm_user) ## Chronosphere Features **Monitoring** - Usage Monitoring - Database Monitoring - API Monitoring - Real-Time Monitoring - Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring - Security and Compliance Monitoring **Visibility ** - Dashboards and Visualizations - Alerts and Notifications - Reporting **Functionality** - Diverse Systems Monitoring - Real-Time Analytics - Observability **Monitoring** - Performance Baselines - Performance Analysis - Performance Monitoring **Alerts management** - Multi-mode alerts - Opimization alerts - Incident alerts **Telemetry Collection & Ingestion - Observability** - Multi-Telemetry Ingestion - OpenTelemetry Support **Agentic AI - Observability Software** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Administration** - Auto-Scaling & Resource Optimization **Monitoring and Management** - Multi-Server Management - Performance Baseline - Real-Time Monitoring - Immediate Alert Notification - Proactive Server Monitoring Software **Management** - Single Pane of Glass - Dashboards and Visualization - Performance Baselines - Alerting **Response** - Dashboards and Visualization - Incident Alerting - Root Cause Analysis (RCA) **Monitoring** - Resource utilization - Real-time monitoring - Performance baseline - API monitoring **Visualization & Dashboards - Observability** - Service Dependency Mapping - Unified Dashboard - Trace Visualization **Automation** - Resolution automation - Automation **Analysis** - Dashboards and Visualizations **Cloud environment support** - Server Monitoring For Cloud Deployments - Software Scaling **Correlation & Root Cause Analysis - Observability** - Cross-Telemetry Correlation - Root Cause Detection - Intelligent Alerting **Agentic AI - Application Performance Monitoring (APM)** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Agentic AI - Enterprise Monitoring** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Analysis** - Search - Reporting - Visualization - Track trends **Scalability & Ecosystem Integration - Observability** - Kubernetes Monitoring - Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Support **Agentic AI - Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring** - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Agentic AI - Server Monitoring** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making **Issue Resolution** - Root cause identification - Resolution guidance - Proactive identification **AI Features - Observability** - Predictive Insights - AI-Generated Incident Summaries - AI Anomaly Detection **AI Automation - Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring** - AI-Powered Anomaly Detection - AI-Driven Insight Recommendations **Performance** - Second by Second Metrics **Functionality** - Cloud Observability ## Top Chronosphere Alternatives - [Datadog](https://www.g2.com/products/datadog/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (689 reviews) - [Dynatrace](https://www.g2.com/products/dynatrace/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (1,231 reviews) - [New Relic](https://www.g2.com/products/new-relic/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (568 reviews)