Back to Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Tools

AppSignal

AppSignal provides error tracking, performance monitoring, and host metrics in a single interface, helping developers debug and optimize their applications efficiently.

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Digital Experience Monitoring

Focuses on the end-user perspective by tracking real-time interactions, synthetic transactions, and mobile performance to ensure satisfaction.

Capability Score
2.05/ 4

Real User Monitoring

Captures and analyzes real-time user interactions to visualize client-side performance.

Avg Score
2.3/ 4
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a fully integrated front-end monitoring solution that captures Core Web Vitals and JavaScript errors, automatically linking these client-side events to backend traces for comprehensive root cause analysis.
View details & rubric context

Real User Monitoring (RUM) captures and analyzes every transaction of every user of a website or application in real-time to visualize actual client-side performance. This enables teams to detect and resolve specific user-facing issues, such as slow page loads or JavaScript errors, that synthetic testing often misses.

What Score 3 Means

Provides a fully integrated RUM solution that automatically captures Core Web Vitals, AJAX requests, and JavaScript errors, linking them directly to backend traces for rapid root cause analysis.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to track or monitor the performance experienced by actual end-users on the client side.
1Users must manually write and inject custom JavaScript to capture client-side metrics and send them to the platform via generic APIs, requiring significant effort to visualize or analyze the data effectively.
2The feature offers basic tracking of aggregate page load times and error rates but lacks granular details like Core Web Vitals, resource waterfalls, or deep single-page application (SPA) support.
3Provides a fully integrated RUM solution that automatically captures Core Web Vitals, AJAX requests, and JavaScript errors, linking them directly to backend traces for rapid root cause analysis.
4Delivers market-leading insights with features like integrated session replay, AI-driven anomaly detection for user experience, and automatic correlation of performance metrics with business outcomes like conversion rates.
Browser Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a production-ready frontend monitoring solution that includes JavaScript error tracking, Core Web Vitals, and correlation with backend traces, though it lacks the session replay capabilities found in market-leading differentiated solutions.
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Browser monitoring captures real-time data on user interactions and page load performance directly from the end-user's web browser. This visibility allows teams to diagnose frontend latency, JavaScript errors, and rendering issues that backend monitoring might miss.

What Score 3 Means

The platform offers robust, out-of-the-box browser monitoring with automatic injection for standard frameworks, providing detailed waterfall charts, JavaScript error tracking, and breakdown by geography, device, and browser type.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to collect or analyze performance metrics from client-side browsers.
1Users can capture browser metrics only by manually instrumenting code to send data to a generic log ingestion API, requiring custom dashboards to interpret the results.
2The tool provides basic Real User Monitoring (RUM) that tracks aggregate page load times and throughput, but lacks detailed waterfall views, specific error stack traces, or single-page application (SPA) support.
3The platform offers robust, out-of-the-box browser monitoring with automatic injection for standard frameworks, providing detailed waterfall charts, JavaScript error tracking, and breakdown by geography, device, and browser type.
4The solution delivers best-in-class frontend observability with features like session replay, Core Web Vitals analysis, and automatic correlation between frontend user actions and backend distributed traces for instant root cause analysis.
Session Replay
Not Supported0
AppSignal does not offer a native session replay feature, instead relying on event breadcrumbs, error logs, and performance traces to provide context for debugging.
View details & rubric context

Session replay provides a visual reproduction of user interactions within an application, allowing teams to see exactly what a user saw and did leading up to an error or performance issue. This context is crucial for reproducing bugs and understanding user behavior beyond raw logs.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no native capability to record or replay user sessions, relying entirely on logs, metrics, and traces for debugging without visual context.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to record or replay user sessions, relying entirely on logs, metrics, and traces for debugging without visual context.
1Session replay functionality is not native but can be approximated by integrating third-party recording tools via generic script injection or by manually correlating timestamped logs with external screen recording software, requiring significant custom development.
2The platform offers basic session replay capabilities that record user screens, but the retention period is short, the player lacks advanced scrubbing or metadata filtering, and integration with backend traces or error logs is loose or requires manual cross-referencing.
3Session replay is a core, fully integrated feature where recordings are automatically linked to specific errors, traces, and performance anomalies. The player includes DOM inspection, console logs, and network waterfall views, allowing engineers to seamlessly transition between visual evidence and code-level data.
4The solution offers market-leading session replay with intelligent indexing that automatically surfaces sessions with rage clicks or specific errors. It includes privacy-by-default masking, zero-latency live streaming of active sessions for support, and AI-driven insights that correlate visual events directly to backend root causes.
JavaScript Error Detection
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a production-ready JavaScript error tracking solution that includes automatic source map un-minification, breadcrumbs, and integration with backend traces, though it lacks native session replay and AI-driven automated code fixes.
View details & rubric context

JavaScript Error Detection captures and analyzes client-side exceptions occurring in users' browsers to prevent broken experiences. This capability allows engineering teams to identify, reproduce, and resolve frontend bugs that impact application stability and user conversion.

What Score 3 Means

The tool offers comprehensive JavaScript error detection with automatic source map un-minification, detailed stack traces, and breadcrumbs of user actions leading up to the crash. It integrates seamlessly with issue tracking systems for immediate triage.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to track or report client-side JavaScript errors occurring in the end-user's browser.
1Error tracking is possible only by manually instrumenting custom log collectors or sending exception data via generic API endpoints, requiring significant developer effort to format and visualize stack traces.
2The platform provides native JavaScript error logging, capturing basic error messages and URLs. However, it lacks source map support for minified code or detailed user session context, making debugging difficult.
3The tool offers comprehensive JavaScript error detection with automatic source map un-minification, detailed stack traces, and breadcrumbs of user actions leading up to the crash. It integrates seamlessly with issue tracking systems for immediate triage.
4This best-in-class implementation correlates JavaScript errors with backend traces and session replay recordings for instant root cause analysis. It utilizes AI to group similar errors, predict impact on business metrics, and suggest code fixes automatically.
AJAX Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal's JavaScript integration automatically instruments Fetch and XHR requests, providing performance metrics and error tracking that are correlated with backend transactions via distributed tracing.
View details & rubric context

AJAX monitoring captures the performance and success rates of asynchronous network requests initiated by the browser, essential for diagnosing latency and errors in dynamic Single Page Applications.

What Score 3 Means

A production-ready feature that automatically instruments all AJAX requests, correlating them with backend transactions via distributed tracing headers and providing detailed breakdowns by URL, status code, and browser type.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to detect, measure, or report on asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX/Fetch) calls made from the client browser.
1Monitoring AJAX calls requires heavy lifting, forcing developers to manually wrap XHR/Fetch objects or write custom code to send timing data to a generic metrics endpoint.
2Native support is available to track aggregate response times and error counts for AJAX calls, but it lacks detailed waterfall visualization, parameter filtering, or backend trace correlation.
3A production-ready feature that automatically instruments all AJAX requests, correlating them with backend transactions via distributed tracing headers and providing detailed breakdowns by URL, status code, and browser type.
4Best-in-class implementation offering automated anomaly detection for specific API endpoints, intelligent grouping of dynamic URL patterns, and deep visibility into request payloads with automatic PII redaction.
Single Page App Support
Basic2
AppSignal offers basic SPA support through framework-specific packages for React, Vue, and Angular that allow for error tracking and performance monitoring during route changes. However, it lacks the seamless, out-of-the-box correlation between soft navigations and backend traces that more advanced RUM solutions provide without manual configuration.
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Single Page App Support ensures that performance monitoring tools accurately track user interactions, route changes, and soft navigations within frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue without requiring full page reloads. This visibility is crucial for understanding the true end-user experience in modern, dynamic web applications.

What Score 2 Means

The tool offers basic automatic instrumentation for major frameworks to capture route changes, but lacks detailed correlation between soft navigations and backend traces or fails to handle complex state changes effectively.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to detect or monitor soft navigations within Single Page Applications, treating the entire session as a single page load or failing to capture subsequent interactions.
1Monitoring SPAs is possible only by manually instrumenting route changes and interactions using generic JavaScript APIs or custom SDK calls, requiring significant developer effort to maintain data accuracy.
2The tool offers basic automatic instrumentation for major frameworks to capture route changes, but lacks detailed correlation between soft navigations and backend traces or fails to handle complex state changes effectively.
3The solution provides robust, out-of-the-box support for all major SPA frameworks, automatically correlating soft navigations with backend traces, capturing virtual page metrics, and visualizing route-based performance without manual configuration.
4The platform delivers best-in-class SPA monitoring with intelligent grouping of dynamic routes, automatic anomaly detection for specific UI components, and seamless integration with session replay to visualize the exact user impact of performance issues during soft navigations.

Web Performance

Optimizes frontend speed and rendering to improve SEO and user experience.

Avg Score
2.3/ 4
Core Web Vitals
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native support for Core Web Vitals through its frontend monitoring agent, offering dedicated dashboards with the ability to filter by URL and device, though it lacks the advanced AI-driven root cause analysis and industry benchmarking required for a higher score.
View details & rubric context

Core Web Vitals monitoring tracks essential metrics like Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift to assess real-world user experience. This feature helps engineering teams optimize page load performance and visual stability, directly impacting search engine rankings and user retention.

What Score 3 Means

Core Web Vitals are automatically instrumented via a RUM agent with deep dashboard integration, allowing users to drill down into specific sessions, filter by page URL, and correlate poor scores with backend traces.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to track, collect, or report on Google's Core Web Vitals metrics.
1Users must manually instrument the application using the web-vitals JavaScript library and send data to the platform via generic custom metric APIs, requiring significant effort to build visualizations.
2The platform natively collects standard metrics (LCP, CLS, INP), but reporting is limited to high-level averages without granular segmentation by route, device, or geography.
3Core Web Vitals are automatically instrumented via a RUM agent with deep dashboard integration, allowing users to drill down into specific sessions, filter by page URL, and correlate poor scores with backend traces.
4The system provides AI-driven insights that automatically identify the root cause of poor scores (e.g., specific unoptimized assets) and benchmarks performance against industry peers or historical baselines in real-time.
Page Load Optimization
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native front-end monitoring that includes support for Core Web Vitals, performance segmentation by browser and device, and detailed loading metrics, though it lacks the automated business-revenue correlation and AI-driven code fixes required for a score of 4.
View details & rubric context

Page load optimization tracks and analyzes the speed at which web pages render for end-users, providing critical insights to improve user experience, SEO rankings, and conversion rates.

What Score 3 Means

The feature provides deep visibility into the loading process, including Core Web Vitals support, detailed resource waterfall charts, and segmentation by browser or device type.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to monitor front-end page load performance or capture user timing metrics.
1Performance tracking is possible only by manually instrumenting application code to capture timing events and sending them to the platform via generic custom metric APIs.
2Native Real User Monitoring (RUM) is present but limited to high-level aggregates like average load time, lacking detailed breakdowns of network latency, DOM processing, or rendering phases.
3The feature provides deep visibility into the loading process, including Core Web Vitals support, detailed resource waterfall charts, and segmentation by browser or device type.
4The solution offers market-leading intelligence by automatically pinpointing specific assets or scripts causing delays, correlating speed with business revenue, and suggesting code-level fixes.
Geographic Performance
DIY1
AppSignal lacks native, automated geographic performance mapping for end-user traffic, requiring developers to manually tag transactions with location data and build custom dashboards to visualize regional performance metrics.
View details & rubric context

Geographic Performance monitoring tracks application latency, throughput, and error rates across different global regions, enabling teams to identify location-specific bottlenecks. This visibility ensures a consistent user experience regardless of where end-users are accessing the application.

What Score 1 Means

Geographic segmentation requires manual instrumentation to capture IP addresses or location headers, followed by the creation of custom queries and dashboards to visualize regional data.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to track or visualize application performance metrics based on the geographic location of the end-user.
1Geographic segmentation requires manual instrumentation to capture IP addresses or location headers, followed by the creation of custom queries and dashboards to visualize regional data.
2Native support exists as a basic breakdown of traffic and latency by country, often presented as a static list or simple heatmap, but lacks city-level granularity or deep filtering options.
3Users can access interactive, real-time global maps that allow drilling down from country to city level, with seamless integration into trace views to diagnose specific regional latency issues.
4The platform offers predictive geographic intelligence, automatically identifying regional outages or slowdowns before they impact SLAs, and correlating them with internet weather, ISP issues, or CDN performance for immediate root cause analysis.

Mobile Monitoring

Ensures stability and performance of mobile applications across devices and networks.

Avg Score
0.0/ 4
Mobile App Monitoring
Not Supported0
AppSignal is a backend-focused APM tool that does not provide native SDKs or capabilities for monitoring iOS or Android mobile applications.
View details & rubric context

Mobile app monitoring provides real-time visibility into the stability and performance of iOS and Android applications by tracking crashes, network latency, and user interactions. This ensures engineering teams can rapidly identify and resolve issues that degrade the end-user experience on mobile devices.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no native capabilities or SDKs for monitoring mobile applications.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capabilities or SDKs for monitoring mobile applications.
1Mobile monitoring is only possible by manually sending telemetry data via generic HTTP APIs or log ingestion. There are no dedicated mobile SDKs, requiring significant custom coding to capture crashes or performance metrics.
2Native SDKs for iOS and Android are available but offer limited functionality, primarily focusing on basic crash reporting. Network monitoring and UI performance metrics are sparse, and data is often siloed from backend APM traces.
3Comprehensive SDKs support major native and hybrid frameworks (iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter) with automatic instrumentation for crashes, HTTP requests, and view loads. Mobile telemetry is fully integrated with backend distributed tracing for end-to-end visibility.
4The solution defines the market standard with features like mobile session replay, automatic detection of user frustration signals (e.g., rage taps), and device-specific performance profiling. It uses AI to correlate mobile anomalies directly with backend root causes without manual investigation.
Device Performance Metrics
Not Supported0
AppSignal is primarily a server-side APM and error tracking tool that lacks native SDKs or features for capturing hardware-level performance metrics, such as battery impact or thermal throttling, from end-user devices.
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Device Performance Metrics track hardware-level health indicators—such as CPU usage, memory consumption, battery impact, and frame rates—on the end-user's device. This visibility enables engineering teams to isolate client-side resource constraints from network or backend issues to optimize the application experience.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no capability to capture or report on the hardware or system-level performance of the end-user's device.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to capture or report on the hardware or system-level performance of the end-user's device.
1Developers can capture device data only by writing custom code to query local APIs and sending the results as generic custom events or logs, requiring manual dashboard configuration.
2Native support captures fundamental metrics like average CPU and memory usage, but lacks granular segmentation by device model or correlation with specific user sessions and crashes.
3The solution automatically collects a full suite of metrics (CPU, memory, disk, battery, UI responsiveness) and integrates them directly into session traces and crash reports for immediate context.
4The platform offers best-in-class analysis with AI-driven anomaly detection for device regressions, thermal throttling insights, and energy consumption profiling to proactively optimize app performance across fragmented device ecosystems.
Mobile Crash Reporting
Not Supported0
AppSignal is primarily focused on server-side and web application monitoring and does not currently offer native SDKs or support for capturing and reporting crashes on mobile platforms like iOS and Android.
View details & rubric context

Mobile crash reporting captures and analyzes application crashes on iOS and Android devices, providing stack traces and device context to help developers resolve stability issues quickly. This ensures a smooth user experience and minimizes churn caused by app failures.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no native capability to detect, capture, or report on mobile application crashes for iOS or Android.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to detect, capture, or report on mobile application crashes for iOS or Android.
1Crash data collection requires manual implementation via generic log ingestion APIs, forcing developers to build their own exception handlers and data formatting logic to visualize issues.
2Native SDKs are available to capture basic crash events and stack traces, but the feature lacks symbolication support, user breadcrumbs, or effective grouping of duplicate issues.
3Offers robust, drop-in SDKs that automatically capture crashes, handle symbolication, group related errors, and provide detailed device context (OS, battery, connectivity) within the main APM workflow.
4Differentiates with Session Replay integration to visualize the crash context, AI-driven regression alerts, and impact analysis that prioritizes fixes based on affected user counts or business value.

Synthetic & Uptime

Simulates user interactions to verify availability and detect issues before customers are impacted.

Avg Score
2.0/ 4
Synthetic Monitoring
Basic2
AppSignal provides native uptime monitoring for checking URL availability and response times, but it lacks advanced synthetic capabilities such as multi-step browser-based transaction scripting or complex user journey simulations.
View details & rubric context

Synthetic monitoring simulates user interactions to proactively detect performance issues and verify uptime before real customers are impacted. It is essential for ensuring consistent availability and functionality across global locations and device types.

What Score 2 Means

Native support is limited to basic uptime monitoring (ping/HTTP checks) or simple single-URL availability, lacking the ability to simulate complex user journeys or browser rendering.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to simulate user traffic or perform availability checks on external endpoints.
1Synthetic checks can only be achieved by writing custom external scripts (e.g., Selenium) and pushing the resulting data into the platform via generic APIs or log ingestion.
2Native support is limited to basic uptime monitoring (ping/HTTP checks) or simple single-URL availability, lacking the ability to simulate complex user journeys or browser rendering.
3The platform provides full browser-based synthetic monitoring with multi-step transaction scripting, global testing locations, and tight integration with backend traces for root cause analysis.
4The solution offers codeless test creation, AI-driven baselining to reduce false positives, and automatic integration into CI/CD pipelines to validate performance shifts pre-production.
Availability Monitoring
Basic2
AppSignal provides native uptime monitoring that allows for simple HTTP checks from multiple global regions with integrated alerting, but it lacks advanced synthetic capabilities such as multi-step transaction scripting or SSL certificate validation.
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Availability monitoring tracks whether applications and services are accessible to users, ensuring uptime and minimizing business impact during outages. It provides critical visibility into system health by continuously testing endpoints from various locations to detect failures immediately.

What Score 2 Means

Native availability monitoring is present but limited to simple HTTP/TCP pings from a single location or a very limited set of regions, with basic pass/fail alerting and no detailed diagnostics.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor the uptime or availability of external endpoints or internal services.
1Availability checks can only be implemented by writing custom scripts that ping endpoints and send data to the platform via generic metric ingestion APIs, requiring significant maintenance and manual configuration.
2Native availability monitoring is present but limited to simple HTTP/TCP pings from a single location or a very limited set of regions, with basic pass/fail alerting and no detailed diagnostics.
3The feature offers robust synthetic monitoring from multiple global locations, supporting complex multi-step transactions, SSL certificate validation, and deep integration with alerting and root cause analysis workflows.
4Availability monitoring includes AI-driven anomaly detection to predict outages before they occur, automatic integration with real-user monitoring (RUM) data for context, and self-healing capabilities or automated incident response triggers.
Uptime Tracking
Basic2
AppSignal provides native uptime monitoring that performs HTTP checks from several global locations and integrates with its alerting system, but it lacks advanced features like multi-step transaction monitoring or comprehensive SLA reporting.
View details & rubric context

Uptime tracking monitors the availability of applications and services from various global locations to ensure they are accessible to end-users. It provides critical visibility into service interruptions, allowing teams to minimize downtime and maintain service level agreements (SLAs).

What Score 2 Means

The system provides basic HTTP/TCP ping checks from a limited number of geographic locations. It reports simple up/down status but lacks support for complex transaction monitoring or detailed SLA reporting.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor service availability, track uptime percentages, or perform synthetic health checks.
1Uptime monitoring requires external scripts or third-party tools to ping services and ingest status data via the platform's API. No native configuration interface exists for availability checks.
2The system provides basic HTTP/TCP ping checks from a limited number of geographic locations. It reports simple up/down status but lacks support for complex transaction monitoring or detailed SLA reporting.
3The feature includes robust multi-location synthetic monitoring for HTTP, SSL, and API endpoints with built-in SLA reporting. It supports multi-step transaction checks (e.g., login flows) and integrates seamlessly with alerting workflows.
4The platform offers intelligent uptime tracking that correlates availability drops with backend APM traces for instant root cause analysis. It includes global coverage from hundreds of edge nodes, AI-driven anomaly detection, and automated remediation triggers.

Business Impact

Aligns technical performance metrics with business goals and user satisfaction.

Avg Score
2.7/ 4
SLA Management
Basic2
AppSignal allows users to set performance and error thresholds with native alerting, which serves as basic SLI monitoring, but it lacks a dedicated SLO management module for tracking error budgets, burn rates, or formal compliance reporting.
View details & rubric context

SLA Management enables teams to define, monitor, and report on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) directly within the APM platform to ensure reliability targets align with business expectations.

What Score 2 Means

Native support exists for setting basic metric thresholds (SLIs) and alerting on breaches, but the feature lacks formal error budget tracking, burn rate visualization, or historical compliance reporting.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to define, track, or report on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) or Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
1Compliance tracking requires heavy lifting, such as exporting raw metric data via APIs to external BI tools or writing complex custom queries to manually calculate availability and latency against targets.
2Native support exists for setting basic metric thresholds (SLIs) and alerting on breaches, but the feature lacks formal error budget tracking, burn rate visualization, or historical compliance reporting.
3The platform offers robust, out-of-the-box SLA management, allowing users to easily define SLOs, visualize error budgets, track burn rates, and generate compliance reports within the main UI.
4A market-leading implementation features predictive analytics to forecast error budget depletion and correlates technical SLAs with business impact. It supports complex composite SLOs and automated remediation triggers.
Apdex Scores
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native Apdex scoring that is fully integrated into its performance dashboards and alerting, allowing users to configure specific thresholds (T) at the application and namespace level to track user satisfaction granularly.
View details & rubric context

Apdex Scores provide a standardized method for converting raw response times into a single user satisfaction metric, allowing teams to align performance goals with actual user experience rather than just technical latency figures.

What Score 3 Means

Apdex scoring is fully integrated with configurable thresholds for individual transactions or services. Scores are embedded in dashboards and alerts, allowing teams to track user satisfaction trends granularly out of the box.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to calculate or display Apdex scores, relying solely on raw latency metrics like average response time or percentiles.
1Users can calculate Apdex scores manually by exporting raw transaction logs or using custom query languages to define the mathematical formula against specific thresholds, but it is not a built-in metric.
2The system calculates a global Apdex score based on a single, system-wide threshold. It provides a simple 0-1 score but lacks the ability to customize thresholds per transaction or service, limiting accuracy for diverse workloads.
3Apdex scoring is fully integrated with configurable thresholds for individual transactions or services. Scores are embedded in dashboards and alerts, allowing teams to track user satisfaction trends granularly out of the box.
4The platform automatically suggests or dynamically adjusts Apdex thresholds based on historical baselines and anomaly detection. It correlates Apdex drops directly with code-level traces and business KPIs for immediate impact analysis.
Throughput Metrics
Advanced3
AppSignal provides comprehensive throughput monitoring with real-time visualizations of request rates (RPM) that can be filtered by specific actions, namespaces, and status codes. While it includes robust anomaly detection and alerting, it lacks the advanced predictive forecasting and automated capacity planning features required for a score of 4.
View details & rubric context

Throughput metrics measure the rate of requests or transactions an application processes over time, providing critical visibility into system load and capacity. This data is essential for identifying bottlenecks, planning scaling events, and understanding overall traffic patterns.

What Score 3 Means

Throughput metrics are fully integrated, offering detailed visualizations of request rates broken down by service, endpoint, and status code with real-time granularity.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to track or display request rates, transaction volumes, or throughput data.
1Users must manually calculate throughput by exporting raw logs to third-party analysis tools or writing custom scripts to aggregate request counts via generic APIs.
2The system provides basic charts showing global requests per minute (RPM), but lacks granular filtering by specific endpoints, methods, or user segments.
3Throughput metrics are fully integrated, offering detailed visualizations of request rates broken down by service, endpoint, and status code with real-time granularity.
4The platform delivers intelligent throughput analysis with automated anomaly detection, correlating traffic spikes to specific events and providing predictive forecasting for capacity planning.
Latency Analysis
Advanced3
AppSignal provides comprehensive latency tracking with native support for p95 and p99 percentiles, histogram visualizations, and the ability to drill down into specific transaction traces to identify performance bottlenecks. While it includes deployment markers and anomaly alerts, it lacks the deep AI-driven predictive insights and automated root-cause regression analysis characteristic of market-leading enterprise solutions.
View details & rubric context

Latency analysis measures the time delay between a user request and the system's response to identify bottlenecks that degrade user experience. This capability allows engineering teams to pinpoint slow transactions and optimize application performance to meet service level agreements.

What Score 3 Means

The tool offers comprehensive latency tracking with native support for key percentiles (p95, p99), histogram views, and the ability to drill down into specific transaction traces to identify the root cause of delays.

Full Rubric
0The product has no built-in capability to measure, track, or visualize request latency or response times across the application stack.
1Latency metrics can only be derived by manually instrumenting application code to log timestamps and exporting raw data to external tools or generic dashboards for calculation.
2The platform provides basic average response time metrics and simple time-series charts, but lacks granular percentile breakdowns (p95, p99) or detailed segmentation by service endpoints.
3The tool offers comprehensive latency tracking with native support for key percentiles (p95, p99), histogram views, and the ability to drill down into specific transaction traces to identify the root cause of delays.
4The solution provides AI-driven latency analysis that automatically detects anomalies and correlates spikes with specific code deployments or infrastructure events, offering predictive insights and automated regression alerts.
Custom Metrics
Advanced3
AppSignal provides comprehensive SDK support for various custom metric types like gauges and counters, which are fully integrated into its dashboarding and alerting systems. While highly capable for production environments, it lacks the advanced automated anomaly detection and dynamic metric derivation from logs or traces required for a score of 4.
View details & rubric context

Custom metrics enable teams to define and track specific application or business KPIs beyond standard infrastructure data, bridging the gap between technical performance and business outcomes.

What Score 3 Means

The platform supports high-cardinality custom metrics with full integration into dashboards and alerting systems, backed by comprehensive SDKs and flexible aggregation options.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to ingest, store, or visualize user-defined metrics, limiting monitoring strictly to pre-configured system parameters.
1Ingesting custom metrics requires building external scripts to push data to a generic API endpoint, lacking native SDK support or easy visualization setup.
2Native ingestion is supported via SDKs, but the feature suffers from limitations such as low cardinality caps, rigid aggregation intervals, or restricted retention periods.
3The platform supports high-cardinality custom metrics with full integration into dashboards and alerting systems, backed by comprehensive SDKs and flexible aggregation options.
4The system offers industry-leading handling of high-cardinality data, automated anomaly detection on custom inputs, and the ability to derive metrics dynamically from logs or traces without code changes.
User Journey Tracking
Basic2
AppSignal provides robust transaction monitoring through 'Actions' and 'Breadcrumbs' for error context, but it lacks a dedicated interface for defining and visualizing multi-step user journeys or business workflows as cohesive entities.
View details & rubric context

User Journey Tracking monitors specific paths users take through an application, correlating technical performance metrics with critical business transactions to ensure key workflows function optimally.

What Score 2 Means

The tool offers basic transaction monitoring that groups requests, but it lacks visualization of the full multi-step journey or fails to effectively link frontend interactions with backend traces.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to define, track, or visualize specific user paths or business transactions within the application.
1Tracking specific user flows is possible only by manually instrumenting code to send custom events or logs, requiring significant development effort to aggregate data into a coherent journey view.
2The tool offers basic transaction monitoring that groups requests, but it lacks visualization of the full multi-step journey or fails to effectively link frontend interactions with backend traces.
3Users can easily define multi-step journeys via the UI or configuration files, with automatic correlation of frontend and backend performance data for each step in the workflow.
4The system automatically discovers and maps critical user journeys using AI, providing predictive analytics on conversion impact and real-time anomaly detection specific to business KPIs without manual configuration.

Application Diagnostics

Provides deep visibility into application logic through tracing, profiling, and error tracking to identify and resolve code-level issues.

Capability Score
2.72/ 4

API & Endpoint Monitoring

Monitors the health and performance of APIs and specific application endpoints.

Avg Score
2.7/ 4
API Monitoring
Basic2
AppSignal provides native tracking of API endpoint performance and error rates through its APM instrumentation, but it lacks a dedicated synthetic monitoring suite for multi-step API transactions and external uptime checks.
View details & rubric context

API monitoring tracks the availability, performance, and functional correctness of application programming interfaces to ensure seamless communication between services. This capability is essential for proactively detecting latency issues and integration failures before they impact the end-user experience.

What Score 2 Means

The tool provides basic uptime monitoring (ping checks) and simple status code tracking for defined endpoints. It lacks support for multi-step transactions, authentication flows, or deep payload inspection.

Full Rubric
0The product has no dedicated functionality for tracking API availability, performance metrics, or transaction health.
1API monitoring can only be achieved by writing custom scripts to ping endpoints or by manually parsing general server logs. Users must build their own alerts and visualizations using generic data ingestion tools.
2The tool provides basic uptime monitoring (ping checks) and simple status code tracking for defined endpoints. It lacks support for multi-step transactions, authentication flows, or deep payload inspection.
3A robust, native API monitoring suite supports multi-step synthetic transactions, authentication handling, and detailed breakdown of network timing (DNS, TCP, SSL). It correlates API metrics directly with backend traces for rapid root cause analysis.
4The solution leads the market with automatic API discovery, schema validation, and AI-driven anomaly detection that identifies regression trends. It offers real-time, deep-packet inspection and automated remediation workflows for complex API ecosystems.
Endpoint Health
Advanced3
AppSignal automatically discovers application routes and provides granular monitoring of golden signals like latency, throughput, and error rates per endpoint, fully integrated with transaction traces for rapid root-cause analysis.
View details & rubric context

Endpoint Health monitoring tracks the availability, latency, and error rates of specific API endpoints or application routes to ensure service reliability. This granular visibility allows teams to identify failing transactions and optimize performance before users experience degradation.

What Score 3 Means

The feature automatically discovers endpoints and tracks golden signals (latency, traffic, errors) per route, fully integrating with distributed tracing for rapid debugging.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to monitor specific API endpoints or application routes, relying solely on infrastructure-level metrics.
1Users must build custom synthetic monitoring scripts or manually instrument application code to log endpoint activity and ingest it via generic APIs.
2Native support provides basic uptime monitoring or simple synthetic checks for defined URLs, offering pass/fail status and response times but lacking deep transaction context.
3The feature automatically discovers endpoints and tracks golden signals (latency, traffic, errors) per route, fully integrating with distributed tracing for rapid debugging.
4Best-in-class implementation uses machine learning to auto-baseline endpoint behavior, detecting anomalies and correlating health shifts directly with code deployments or business KPIs.
HTTP Status Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal automatically captures and categorizes HTTP status codes for all instrumented requests, providing dedicated dashboards for visualization and allowing users to set alerts on specific error rates while correlating them directly with transaction traces.
View details & rubric context

HTTP Status Monitoring tracks response codes returned by web servers to ensure application availability and reliability, allowing engineering teams to instantly detect errors and diagnose uptime issues.

What Score 3 Means

The system automatically captures and categorizes all HTTP status codes (2xx, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx) with rich visualizations, allowing users to easily filter traffic, set alerts on specific error rates, and correlate status codes with specific transactions.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor or record HTTP status codes from application requests or endpoints.
1Monitoring HTTP status codes requires writing custom scripts to ping endpoints and send results via generic API ingestion, or manually configuring complex log parsing rules to extract status codes from raw server logs.
2Native support allows for basic tracking of success versus failure rates (e.g., 200 vs 500 errors), but lacks granular breakdown by specific status codes, detailed historical trends, or context regarding the request source.
3The system automatically captures and categorizes all HTTP status codes (2xx, 3xx, 4xx, 5xx) with rich visualizations, allowing users to easily filter traffic, set alerts on specific error rates, and correlate status codes with specific transactions.
4The platform utilizes machine learning to detect anomalies in HTTP status patterns automatically, offering predictive alerting and one-click drill-downs that instantly link status code spikes to specific lines of code, infrastructure changes, or user segments.

Distributed Tracing

Visualizes requests across microservices to pinpoint latency and errors in complex systems.

Avg Score
3.0/ 4
Distributed Tracing
Advanced3
AppSignal provides robust, out-of-the-box distributed tracing with auto-instrumentation for major languages and seamless integration between traces, errors, and metrics. While it offers clear waterfall visualizations and OpenTelemetry support, it lacks the advanced AI-driven root cause analysis and dynamic service mapping found in market-leading enterprise solutions.
View details & rubric context

Distributed tracing tracks requests as they propagate through microservices and distributed systems, enabling teams to pinpoint latency bottlenecks and error sources across complex architectures.

What Score 3 Means

Features robust, out-of-the-box tracing with auto-instrumentation for major languages, detailed span attributes, and tight integration with logs and metrics for effective debugging.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to trace requests across service boundaries, restricting visibility to isolated component metrics.
1Tracing can be achieved by manually instrumenting code to send data to generic log endpoints or APIs, requiring significant custom configuration to visualize flows.
2Basic tracing is available with standard waterfall visualizations, but it suffers from heavy sampling, limited retention, or a lack of deep context within spans.
3Features robust, out-of-the-box tracing with auto-instrumentation for major languages, detailed span attributes, and tight integration with logs and metrics for effective debugging.
4Delivers market-leading tracing with features like 100% sampling (no tail-based sampling limits), AI-driven root cause analysis, and automated service map generation that dynamically reflects architecture changes.
Transaction Tracing
Advanced3
AppSignal provides robust transaction tracing with automatic instrumentation for various languages, offering detailed waterfall visualizations and distributed tracing capabilities that integrate seamlessly with its error and metric monitoring.
View details & rubric context

Transaction tracing enables teams to visualize and analyze the complete path of a request across distributed services to pinpoint latency bottlenecks and error sources. This visibility is critical for diagnosing performance issues within complex microservices architectures.

What Score 3 Means

The solution offers robust distributed tracing with automatic instrumentation for common frameworks, providing clear waterfall charts and seamless integration with logs and metrics.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to track or visualize the flow of individual transactions across application components.
1Tracing can only be achieved by manually instrumenting code to pass correlation IDs and aggregating logs via generic APIs, requiring significant custom development and maintenance.
2Native support exists but is limited to basic sampling or single-service views, often lacking automatic context propagation or detailed waterfall visualizations.
3The solution offers robust distributed tracing with automatic instrumentation for common frameworks, providing clear waterfall charts and seamless integration with logs and metrics.
4Best-in-class implementation features AI-driven root cause analysis, infinite trace retention without sampling, and dynamic service mapping that automatically highlights performance regressions.
Cross-Application Tracing
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native support for distributed tracing across multiple applications and services with automatic instrumentation for major languages like Ruby, Elixir, and Node.js, offering detailed waterfall visualizations and integrated performance insights.
View details & rubric context

Cross-application tracing enables the visualization and analysis of transaction paths as they traverse multiple services and infrastructure components. This capability is essential for identifying latency bottlenecks and pinpointing the root cause of errors in complex, distributed architectures.

What Score 3 Means

The solution provides automatic instrumentation for major languages and frameworks, delivering detailed service maps and end-to-end transaction traces that are fully integrated into dashboard workflows for rapid troubleshooting.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to trace requests across different applications or services, treating each component as an isolated silo.
1Tracing can be achieved by manually instrumenting code to pass correlation IDs via generic headers and aggregating logs through custom scripts or external API calls, requiring significant development effort to maintain.
2Native support for distributed tracing exists but is limited to specific languages or frameworks and offers only simple waterfall visualizations without deep context or dependency mapping.
3The solution provides automatic instrumentation for major languages and frameworks, delivering detailed service maps and end-to-end transaction traces that are fully integrated into dashboard workflows for rapid troubleshooting.
4The platform offers best-in-class tracing with AI-driven anomaly detection, automatic root cause analysis of trace data, and seamless correlation with logs and metrics, providing instant visibility into complex distributed systems with zero manual configuration.
Span Analysis
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a production-ready interactive waterfall visualization for spans (events) that includes metadata, tagging, and seamless integration with error tracking and host metrics, though it lacks the advanced AI-driven automated root cause analysis required for a higher score.
View details & rubric context

Span Analysis enables the detailed inspection of individual units of work within a distributed trace, such as database queries or API calls, to pinpoint latency bottlenecks and error sources. By aggregating and visualizing span data, teams can optimize specific operations within complex microservices architectures.

What Score 3 Means

A fully interactive waterfall visualization allows users to filter spans by high-cardinality tags, view attached logs, and seamlessly pivot between spans and related service metrics.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to capture, visualize, or analyze individual spans or units of work within a transaction trace.
1Span-level data can only be analyzed by manually exporting raw trace logs to external tools or building custom dashboards via API queries; there is no native UI for span inspection.
2The tool provides a basic waterfall view of spans showing duration and hierarchy, but lacks advanced filtering, attribute tagging, or aggregation capabilities.
3A fully interactive waterfall visualization allows users to filter spans by high-cardinality tags, view attached logs, and seamlessly pivot between spans and related service metrics.
4The platform offers aggregate span analysis across all traces (e.g., identifying slow database queries globally) and uses AI to automatically surface anomalous spans and root causes without manual searching.
Waterfall Visualization
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a robust, interactive waterfall visualization for transaction traces that clearly displays parent-child dependencies and detailed timing for spans like database queries and external requests. While highly functional and integrated with error tracking, it lacks the advanced automated bottleneck analysis and historical side-by-side comparison required for a score of 4.
View details & rubric context

Waterfall visualization provides a graphical representation of the sequence and duration of events in a transaction or page load, essential for pinpointing bottlenecks and understanding dependency chains.

What Score 3 Means

A fully interactive waterfall view provides detailed timing breakdowns, clear parent-child dependency trees, and quick filters for errors or latency outliers. It integrates seamlessly with related log data and infrastructure context.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to visualize traces, network requests, or transaction timings in a waterfall format.
1Visualizing sequences requires exporting raw trace data via APIs to third-party visualization tools or manually correlating timestamped logs to reconstruct the timeline.
2Native support exists but is limited to a static list of spans showing basic start and end times. It lacks granular timing breakdowns (e.g., DNS, wait, download) or visual hierarchy for complex nested traces.
3A fully interactive waterfall view provides detailed timing breakdowns, clear parent-child dependency trees, and quick filters for errors or latency outliers. It integrates seamlessly with related log data and infrastructure context.
4The implementation automatically identifies the critical path and highlights bottlenecks using intelligent analysis. It allows side-by-side comparison with historical traces to detect regressions and provides actionable optimization insights directly within the visualization.

Root Cause Analysis

Identifies the underlying sources of bottlenecks and errors within distributed architectures.

Avg Score
2.3/ 4
Root Cause Analysis
Advanced3
AppSignal provides robust root cause analysis by integrating error tracking, performance monitoring, and distributed tracing, allowing developers to drill down from high-level alerts to specific slow database queries or lines of code. While it offers deep visibility and correlation across the stack, it lacks the AI-driven automated remediation and proactive anomaly detection required for a score of 4.
View details & rubric context

Root Cause Analysis enables engineering teams to rapidly pinpoint the underlying source of performance bottlenecks or errors within complex distributed systems by correlating traces, logs, and metrics. This capability reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) and minimizes the impact of downtime on end-user experience.

What Score 3 Means

The platform offers robust Root Cause Analysis with fully integrated distributed tracing, allowing users to drill down from high-level alerts to specific lines of code or database queries seamlessly.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to identify the source of errors or latency; users must manually sift through raw data without correlation features.
1Root cause identification requires exporting raw telemetry data to external analysis tools or writing custom scripts to correlate events across services manually.
2Basic Root Cause Analysis is provided through simple correlation of metrics and logs, but it lacks automated insights or deep linking between distributed traces and infrastructure health.
3The platform offers robust Root Cause Analysis with fully integrated distributed tracing, allowing users to drill down from high-level alerts to specific lines of code or database queries seamlessly.
4AI-driven Root Cause Analysis automatically detects anomalies, correlates them across the full stack, and proactively suggests remediation steps, significantly reducing manual investigation time.
Service Dependency Mapping
Not Supported0
AppSignal does not currently offer a native visual service map or topology visualization; while it tracks external requests and database queries within transaction traces, it lacks a dedicated interface to map the relationships between distributed services.
View details & rubric context

Service dependency mapping visualizes the complex web of interactions between application components, databases, and third-party APIs to reveal how data flows through a system. This visibility is essential for IT teams to instantly isolate the root cause of performance issues and understand the downstream impact of failures in distributed architectures.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no native functionality to map or visualize relationships between services or infrastructure components.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native functionality to map or visualize relationships between services or infrastructure components.
1Dependency views can be approximated by manually configuring service tags, defining static relationships in configuration files, or correlating logs via custom scripts, but the process is manual and prone to staleness.
2A basic topology map is generated automatically based on traffic, but it is often static, lacks detailed performance metrics on the connection lines, or struggles to render clearly in high-cardinality environments.
3The platform provides a dynamic, interactive service map that updates in real-time, showing traffic flow, latency, and error rates between nodes with seamless drill-down capabilities into specific traces or logs.
4The solution offers best-in-class topology visualization with historical playback (time travel) to view state changes during incidents, AI-driven anomaly detection on specific dependency paths, and automatic identification of critical bottlenecks.
Hotspot Identification
Advanced3
AppSignal provides deep, out-of-the-box visibility into performance hotspots by automatically identifying slow SQL queries, external API calls, and specific method execution within transaction traces, though it lacks the advanced AI-driven proactive optimization suggestions required for a higher score.
View details & rubric context

Hotspot identification automatically detects and isolates specific lines of code, database queries, or resource constraints causing performance bottlenecks. This capability enables engineering teams to rapidly pinpoint the root cause of latency without manually sifting through logs or traces.

What Score 3 Means

The platform provides deep, out-of-the-box hotspot identification that pinpoints specific slow methods, SQL queries, and external calls within the transaction trace view, fully integrated with standard dashboards.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to identify specific code or infrastructure hotspots, requiring users to rely entirely on external tools or manual log analysis.
1Hotspots can only be identified by manually instrumenting code with custom timers or exporting raw trace data to third-party analysis tools to correlate latency with specific resources.
2Native hotspot identification is available but limited to high-level metrics (e.g., indicating a database is slow) without drilling down into specific queries or lines of code, or lacks historical context.
3The platform provides deep, out-of-the-box hotspot identification that pinpoints specific slow methods, SQL queries, and external calls within the transaction trace view, fully integrated with standard dashboards.
4The system utilizes AI/ML to proactively predict and surface hotspots before they impact users, offering continuous code-level profiling (e.g., flame graphs) and automated optimization suggestions for complex distributed systems.
Topology Maps
Advanced3
AppSignal provides an automated Service Map feature that visualizes dependencies between services and external resources, allowing users to interactively drill down into performance metrics and error rates. While it offers real-time discovery and visibility, it lacks the advanced time-travel playback or AI-driven root cause propagation analysis required for a score of 4.
View details & rubric context

Topology maps provide a dynamic visual representation of application dependencies and infrastructure relationships, enabling teams to instantly visualize architecture and pinpoint the root cause of performance bottlenecks.

What Score 3 Means

The platform offers automatic, real-time discovery of services and infrastructure. The map is fully interactive, allowing users to drill down into metrics and traces directly from the visual nodes without configuration.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to visualize application dependencies, service maps, or infrastructure topology.
1Users can construct visualizations only by manually configuring generic graphing widgets or exporting data to external diagramming tools via APIs, requiring constant manual updates to reflect architectural changes.
2A basic service map is provided, but it relies on static configurations or infrequent discovery intervals. It lacks interactivity, depth in dependency details, or real-time status overlays.
3The platform offers automatic, real-time discovery of services and infrastructure. The map is fully interactive, allowing users to drill down into metrics and traces directly from the visual nodes without configuration.
4The topology map is a central navigational hub featuring time-travel playback to view historical states, cross-layer correlation (app-to-infra), and AI-driven context that automatically highlights the propagation path of errors across dependencies.

Code Profiling

Analyzes code execution to optimize resource usage and resolve method-level bottlenecks.

Avg Score
3.0/ 4
Code Profiling
Advanced3
AppSignal provides integrated profiling that offers interactive flame graphs directly within transaction traces, allowing developers to analyze method-level performance and bottlenecks in production with low overhead.
View details & rubric context

Code profiling analyzes application execution at the method or line level to identify specific functions consuming excessive CPU, memory, or time. This granular visibility enables engineering teams to optimize resource usage and eliminate performance bottlenecks efficiently.

What Score 3 Means

Continuous code profiling is fully supported with low overhead, offering interactive flame graphs integrated directly into trace views for seamless debugging from request to code.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native code profiling capabilities and cannot inspect performance at the method or line level.
1Profiling requires manual instrumentation using external libraries or generic APIs to ingest data, with no native agents or automated collection mechanisms to simplify the process.
2Native profiling is available but limited to on-demand snapshots or specific languages, often presented in isolation without direct correlation to distributed traces or infrastructure metrics.
3Continuous code profiling is fully supported with low overhead, offering interactive flame graphs integrated directly into trace views for seamless debugging from request to code.
4The platform provides always-on, whole-fleet profiling with automated regression detection, AI-driven root cause analysis, and direct cost-impact estimation for code inefficiencies.
Thread Profiling
Advanced3
AppSignal provides integrated sampled profiling that generates flame graphs and call trees within transaction traces, allowing developers to identify code-level hotspots, though it lacks the always-on AI-driven insights and automated deadlock detection found in market-leading solutions.
View details & rubric context

Thread profiling captures and analyzes the execution state of application threads to identify CPU hotspots, deadlocks, and synchronization issues at the code level. This visibility is critical for optimizing resource utilization and resolving complex latency problems that standard metrics cannot explain.

What Score 3 Means

Strong, fully-integrated profiling offers continuous or low-overhead sampling with advanced visualizations like flame graphs and call trees, allowing users to easily drill down into specific transactions.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to capture, store, or analyze application thread dumps or profiles.
1Thread analysis requires significant manual effort, relying on external tools or scripts to capture dumps which must then be manually uploaded or parsed via generic APIs for basic visibility.
2Native support exists to trigger on-demand thread dumps, but the analysis is limited to raw text views or simple stack lists without visual aggregation or historical context.
3Strong, fully-integrated profiling offers continuous or low-overhead sampling with advanced visualizations like flame graphs and call trees, allowing users to easily drill down into specific transactions.
4Best-in-class implementation features always-on, low-overhead profiling with AI-driven insights that automatically detect deadlocks and correlate code-level hotspots with specific performance regressions.
CPU Usage Analysis
Best4
AppSignal provides comprehensive CPU monitoring for hosts and containers and includes a continuous profiling feature with flame graphs to pinpoint specific lines of code causing CPU spikes, meeting the criteria for a differentiated solution.
View details & rubric context

CPU Usage Analysis tracks the processing power consumed by applications and infrastructure, enabling engineering teams to identify performance bottlenecks, optimize resource allocation, and prevent system degradation.

What Score 4 Means

The feature includes continuous code profiling (e.g., flame graphs) to identify specific lines of code driving CPU spikes, supported by AI-driven anomaly detection for predictive resource scaling.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor, collect, or visualize CPU consumption data for applications or infrastructure.
1Users must manually instrument code or use generic metric APIs to send CPU data, requiring significant effort to build custom dashboards for visualization.
2Native support provides basic system-level CPU averages, but lacks granular breakdowns by process or container and offers limited historical data retention.
3The platform offers deep, out-of-the-box CPU monitoring with granular breakdowns by host, container, and process, integrated seamlessly into standard dashboards and alerting workflows.
4The feature includes continuous code profiling (e.g., flame graphs) to identify specific lines of code driving CPU spikes, supported by AI-driven anomaly detection for predictive resource scaling.
Method-Level Timing
Advanced3
AppSignal automatically instruments common framework methods and libraries to provide detailed transaction traces and event timelines, allowing developers to visualize call trees and identify bottlenecks within the execution flow.
View details & rubric context

Method-level timing captures the execution duration of individual code functions to identify specific bottlenecks within application logic. This granular visibility allows engineering teams to optimize code performance precisely rather than guessing based on high-level transaction metrics.

What Score 3 Means

The tool automatically instruments code to capture method-level timing with low overhead, visualizing call trees and flame graphs directly within transaction traces for immediate root cause analysis.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to instrument or visualize execution times at the individual function or method level, limiting visibility to high-level transaction or service boundaries.
1Users must manually wrap code blocks with custom timers or use generic SDK calls to send timing data as custom metrics, requiring significant code changes and maintenance to track specific methods.
2Native profiling exists but is often sampled heavily, limited to specific languages, or presents data in a flat list without context, making it difficult to correlate specific method slowness with user transactions.
3The tool automatically instruments code to capture method-level timing with low overhead, visualizing call trees and flame graphs directly within transaction traces for immediate root cause analysis.
4Continuous, always-on profiling analyzes method performance in real-time with negligible overhead, automatically highlighting regression trends and correlating code-level latency with business impact or resource saturation.
Deadlock Detection
Basic2
AppSignal natively captures deadlock exceptions as part of its standard error tracking and provides transaction traces, but it lacks specialized deadlock-specific visualizations such as wait graphs or deep analysis of resource contention.
View details & rubric context

Deadlock detection identifies scenarios where application threads or database processes become permanently blocked waiting for one another, allowing teams to resolve critical freezes and prevent system-wide outages.

What Score 2 Means

Native detection exists but is limited to high-level alerts indicating a deadlock occurred, without providing the specific thread dumps, query details, or resource graphs needed to diagnose the root cause.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to detect, alert on, or visualize application or database deadlocks.
1Detection requires manual workarounds, such as scraping raw log files for deadlock errors or writing custom scripts to query database lock tables and send metrics to the APM via API.
2Native detection exists but is limited to high-level alerts indicating a deadlock occurred, without providing the specific thread dumps, query details, or resource graphs needed to diagnose the root cause.
3The solution automatically captures and visualizes deadlocks with deep context, including the specific threads involved, the exact SQL queries or resources held, and the wait graph, fully integrated into transaction traces.
4The tool offers market-leading analysis by aggregating historical deadlock trends to pinpoint architectural flaws and uses heuristic analysis to predict or suggest optimizations for high-contention resources before severe outages occur.

Error & Exception Handling

Captures and aggregates application errors to facilitate rapid debugging and resolution.

Avg Score
3.0/ 4
Error Tracking
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a robust, production-ready error tracking system that includes automatic exception grouping, detailed stack traces with contextual metadata, and seamless integration with deployment tracking and issue management tools. While it offers deep correlation between errors and performance metrics, it lacks the advanced AI-driven root cause suggestions and predictive alerting found in market-leading specialized tools.
View details & rubric context

Error tracking captures and groups application exceptions in real-time, providing engineering teams with the stack traces and context needed to diagnose and resolve code issues efficiently.

What Score 3 Means

The feature offers robust, out-of-the-box error monitoring that automatically groups and deduplicates exceptions. It includes full stack traces, release tracking, and seamless integration with issue management systems for efficient workflows.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to capture, aggregate, or display application errors or exceptions.
1Error data can only be ingested via generic log forwarding or raw API endpoints, requiring manual parsing, custom scripts to group exceptions, and external visualization tools.
2Native error capturing is available but limited to raw lists of exceptions and basic stack traces. It lacks intelligent grouping, deduplication, or rich context, making triage difficult during high-volume incidents.
3The feature offers robust, out-of-the-box error monitoring that automatically groups and deduplicates exceptions. It includes full stack traces, release tracking, and seamless integration with issue management systems for efficient workflows.
4Best-in-class error tracking utilizes AI to identify root causes and suggest fixes while correlating errors with distributed traces. It includes regression detection, impact analysis, and predictive alerting to proactively manage application health.
Stack Trace Visibility
Advanced3
AppSignal provides fully interactive stack traces that include syntax highlighting, source map support for de-obfuscation, and the ability to filter between application and framework code while linking directly to version control repositories.
View details & rubric context

Stack trace visibility provides granular insight into the sequence of function calls leading to an error or latency spike, enabling developers to pinpoint the exact line of code responsible for application failures. This capability is critical for reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) by eliminating guesswork during debugging.

What Score 3 Means

The feature offers fully interactive stack traces with syntax highlighting, automatic de-obfuscation (e.g., source maps), and clear separation of application code from framework code, linking directly to repositories.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to capture, store, or display stack traces, forcing users to rely on external logging systems or manual reproduction to diagnose code-level issues.
1Users can capture stack traces only by manually formatting them as string payloads and sending them to a generic log ingestion endpoint, with no dedicated UI for parsing or readability.
2The platform captures and displays stack traces natively, but presents them as simple, unformatted text blocks without syntax highlighting, frame collapsing, or distinction between user code and vendor libraries.
3The feature offers fully interactive stack traces with syntax highlighting, automatic de-obfuscation (e.g., source maps), and clear separation of application code from framework code, linking directly to repositories.
4Best-in-class implementation includes AI-driven root cause analysis that highlights the specific frame causing the crash, integrates distributed tracing context across microservices, and provides inline git blame context for immediate ownership identification.
Exception Aggregation
Advanced3
AppSignal provides intelligent error grouping by normalizing stack traces to ignore dynamic variables and offers native UI controls for developers to manually merge or split error incidents.
View details & rubric context

Exception aggregation consolidates duplicate error occurrences into single, manageable issues to prevent alert fatigue. This ensures engineering teams can identify high-impact bugs and prioritize fixes based on frequency rather than raw log volume.

What Score 3 Means

The system intelligently groups errors by normalizing stack traces to ignore dynamic variables and offers UI controls for manually merging or splitting groups.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to group or aggregate exceptions, presenting every error occurrence as a standalone log entry.
1De-duplication requires exporting raw log data to external analysis tools or writing custom scripts to parse and group errors via API.
2Native aggregation exists but relies on simple, rigid criteria like exact message matching, often failing to group errors with variable data (e.g., timestamps or IDs).
3The system intelligently groups errors by normalizing stack traces to ignore dynamic variables and offers UI controls for manually merging or splitting groups.
4Market-leading aggregation uses machine learning to automatically fingerprint and correlate related errors across distributed services, distinguishing signal from noise without manual rule configuration.

Memory & Runtime Metrics

Monitors memory usage and garbage collection to prevent leaks and crashes.

Avg Score
2.4/ 4
Memory Leak Detection
Advanced3
AppSignal provides continuous profiling and host metrics that allow developers to monitor memory usage and drill down into specific code paths and allocation rates to identify the source of memory leaks directly within the platform.
View details & rubric context

Memory leak detection identifies application code that fails to release memory, causing performance degradation or crashes over time. This capability is critical for maintaining application stability and preventing resource exhaustion in production environments.

What Score 3 Means

The tool offers continuous profiling with automated heap analysis, allowing developers to drill down into object allocation rates and identify specific code paths causing leaks directly within the UI.

Full Rubric
0The product has no built-in capability to track memory usage patterns or identify potential leaks within the application runtime.
1Detection requires users to manually export heap dumps via generic command-line tools or APIs and analyze them in third-party profilers, with no native correlation to the APM dashboard.
2Native support provides high-level memory usage metrics (e.g., total heap used) and basic alerts for threshold breaches, but lacks object-level granularity or automatic root cause analysis.
3The tool offers continuous profiling with automated heap analysis, allowing developers to drill down into object allocation rates and identify specific code paths causing leaks directly within the UI.
4The system utilizes AI-driven anomaly detection to predict leaks before they impact performance, automatically capturing snapshots and pinpointing the exact line of code and object references responsible for the retention.
Garbage Collection Metrics
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native, out-of-the-box visibility into garbage collection metrics, including pause times and frequency, and integrates this data directly into transaction traces for major supported runtimes like Ruby, Node.js, and Elixir.
View details & rubric context

Garbage collection metrics track memory reclamation processes within application runtimes to identify latency-inducing pauses and potential memory leaks. This visibility is essential for optimizing resource utilization and preventing application stalls caused by inefficient memory management.

What Score 3 Means

The tool offers deep, out-of-the-box visibility into garbage collection, automatically visualizing pause times, frequency, and throughput across specific memory pools for major runtimes like Java, .NET, and Go.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to track or visualize garbage collection events, memory pool statistics, or runtime pause durations.
1Users can monitor garbage collection only by manually instrumenting code to emit custom metrics or by building external scripts to parse and forward GC logs to the platform via generic APIs.
2Native support is provided for basic metrics like total heap usage and aggregate pause times, but the tool lacks granular visibility into specific memory generations (e.g., Eden vs. Old Gen) or specific collector algorithms.
3The tool offers deep, out-of-the-box visibility into garbage collection, automatically visualizing pause times, frequency, and throughput across specific memory pools for major runtimes like Java, .NET, and Go.
4The platform intelligently correlates garbage collection pauses with specific transaction latency, automatically identifying memory leaks and suggesting precise runtime configuration tuning to optimize performance.
Heap Dump Analysis
Not Supported0
AppSignal focuses on performance monitoring, error tracking, and host metrics, but it does not provide native capabilities to capture, store, or analyze application heap dumps.
View details & rubric context

Heap dump analysis enables the capture and inspection of application memory snapshots to identify memory leaks and optimize object allocation. This feature is essential for diagnosing complex memory-related crashes and ensuring stability in production environments.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no native capability to capture, store, or analyze heap dumps, forcing developers to rely entirely on external, local debugging tools.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to capture, store, or analyze heap dumps, forcing developers to rely entirely on external, local debugging tools.
1Memory snapshots can be triggered via generic scripts or APIs, but analysis requires manually downloading the dump file to a local machine for inspection with third-party utilities.
2Native support includes triggering dumps and viewing basic statistics like top classes by size or instance count, but lacks advanced navigation features like dominator trees or reference chains.
3A fully integrated analyzer allows users to trigger, store, and inspect heap dumps within the web UI, offering deep visibility into object references, dominator trees, and garbage collection roots.
4The system automatically captures heap dumps during memory spikes or crashes and uses intelligent algorithms to instantly highlight likely memory leaks and problematic code paths with zero manual intervention.
JVM Metrics
Advanced3
AppSignal supports Java applications through an OpenTelemetry-based integration that automatically collects comprehensive JVM metrics, including heap memory, garbage collection, and thread activity, which are then visualized in pre-built dashboards.
View details & rubric context

JVM Metrics provide deep visibility into the Java Virtual Machine's internal health, tracking critical indicators like memory usage, garbage collection, and thread activity to diagnose bottlenecks and prevent crashes.

What Score 3 Means

The solution automatically detects Java environments and captures comprehensive metrics, including detailed heap/non-heap breakdowns, GC pause times, and thread profiling, presented in pre-built, interactive dashboards.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to collect, ingest, or visualize specific Java Virtual Machine (JVM) metrics.
1Users must manually instrument applications to expose JMX (Java Management Extensions) data and configure custom collectors or scripts to send this data to the platform via generic APIs.
2The tool provides a basic agent that captures high-level metrics such as total heap usage and CPU load. It lacks granular details on specific memory pools, garbage collection generations, or thread states.
3The solution automatically detects Java environments and captures comprehensive metrics, including detailed heap/non-heap breakdowns, GC pause times, and thread profiling, presented in pre-built, interactive dashboards.
4The platform offers continuous, low-overhead profiling with automated anomaly detection for JVM health. It correlates metrics with specific traces and provides AI-driven recommendations for tuning heap sizes and garbage collection strategies.
CLR Metrics
Advanced3
AppSignal for .NET automatically collects and visualizes a comprehensive suite of CLR metrics, including garbage collection, thread pool usage, and memory stats, through pre-built dashboards integrated into its APM platform.
View details & rubric context

CLR Metrics provide deep visibility into the .NET Common Language Runtime environment, tracking critical data points like garbage collection, thread pool usage, and memory allocation. This data is essential for diagnosing performance bottlenecks, memory leaks, and concurrency issues within .NET applications.

What Score 3 Means

The platform automatically collects and visualizes a full suite of CLR metrics, including GC generations (0, 1, 2, LOH), thread pool usage, and JIT compilation, fully integrated into application performance dashboards.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to capture, store, or visualize .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) metrics.
1Collection of CLR data requires manual configuration of Windows Performance Counters or custom instrumentation to push metrics via generic APIs, with no pre-built dashboards.
2Native support captures high-level metrics like total memory and CPU, but lacks granular visibility into specific garbage collection generations, heap sizes, or thread pool contention.
3The platform automatically collects and visualizes a full suite of CLR metrics, including GC generations (0, 1, 2, LOH), thread pool usage, and JIT compilation, fully integrated into application performance dashboards.
4Best-in-class support correlates CLR metrics directly with code execution paths and includes advanced diagnostic tools like automatic memory leak detection, on-demand heap snapshots, and intelligent alerting for garbage collection anomalies.

Infrastructure & Services

Monitors the health and performance of underlying servers, databases, containers, and network layers supporting the application.

Capability Score
2.48/ 4

Network & Connectivity

Tracks network layers and protocols to diagnose connectivity and latency issues.

Avg Score
1.6/ 4
Network Performance Monitoring
Basic2
AppSignal provides basic host-level network metrics such as bytes sent and received through its host monitoring agent, but it lacks advanced network-specific diagnostics like TCP/IP analysis, DNS resolution monitoring, or deep packet inspection.
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Network Performance Monitoring tracks metrics like latency, throughput, and packet loss to identify connectivity issues affecting application stability. This capability allows teams to distinguish between code-level errors and infrastructure bottlenecks for faster troubleshooting.

What Score 2 Means

Native support provides basic network metrics such as bytes in/out and simple error counters at the host level, but lacks deep visibility into protocols, specific connections, or distributed tracing context.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor network traffic, latency, or connectivity metrics, focusing solely on application code or server resources.
1Network metrics can only be ingested via generic API endpoints or by writing custom scripts to scrape network device logs, requiring significant manual configuration to correlate with application performance data.
2Native support provides basic network metrics such as bytes in/out and simple error counters at the host level, but lacks deep visibility into protocols, specific connections, or distributed tracing context.
3The feature offers comprehensive monitoring of TCP/IP metrics, DNS resolution, and HTTP latency, fully integrated with service maps to visualize dependencies and automatically correlate network spikes with application traces.
4A market-leading implementation utilizes low-overhead technologies like eBPF to provide kernel-level visibility into every packet and system call, offering real-time topology mapping and AI-driven root cause analysis that instantly isolates network faults from application errors.
ISP Performance
Not Supported0
AppSignal focuses primarily on application-level performance, error tracking, and host metrics, lacking native features for monitoring ISP-specific network performance or distinguishing network-layer latency from application code issues.
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ISP Performance monitoring tracks network connectivity metrics across different Internet Service Providers to identify if latency or downtime is caused by the network rather than the application code. This visibility is crucial for diagnosing regional outages and ensuring a consistent user experience globally.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no visibility into network performance outside the application infrastructure and cannot distinguish ISP-related issues from server-side errors.

Full Rubric
0The product has no visibility into network performance outside the application infrastructure and cannot distinguish ISP-related issues from server-side errors.
1ISP performance data can only be correlated by manually ingesting third-party network logs via generic APIs or by writing custom scripts to ping external endpoints and visualize the results in a custom dashboard.
2Native ISP performance monitoring is available but limited to basic metrics like aggregate latency per region. It lacks granular breakdown by specific provider or detailed hop-by-hop analysis.
3The platform offers robust ISP performance tracking with detailed breakdowns by provider, geography, and connection type. It integrates seamlessly into the main APM dashboard, allowing users to quickly isolate network bottlenecks from application code issues.
4The solution provides market-leading ISP intelligence with real-time internet weather maps, predictive analytics for network outages, and automated root cause analysis that instantly pinpoints specific peering points or ISPs causing degradation.
TCP/IP Metrics
Basic2
AppSignal provides basic host-level network metrics such as throughput (bytes in/out) and connection counts, but it lacks granular TCP-specific diagnostics like retransmissions, packet loss, or round-trip time (RTT) analysis.
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TCP/IP metrics provide critical visibility into the network layer by tracking indicators like latency, packet loss, and retransmissions to diagnose connectivity issues. This allows teams to distinguish between application-level failures and underlying network infrastructure problems.

What Score 2 Means

Basic network monitoring is included, tracking fundamental metrics like throughput (bytes in/out) and connection counts, but lacks granular insights into retransmissions or round-trip times.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to collect or visualize network-level TCP/IP traffic data.
1Network data collection requires installing separate plugins, parsing OS logs (e.g., netstat), or building custom integrations to send network counters to the APM API.
2Basic network monitoring is included, tracking fundamental metrics like throughput (bytes in/out) and connection counts, but lacks granular insights into retransmissions or round-trip times.
3The solution offers comprehensive, out-of-the-box TCP/IP monitoring, correlating metrics like retransmissions, connection errors, and latency directly with specific application services and containers.
4The platform utilizes advanced technologies like eBPF for low-overhead, kernel-level visibility, automatically mapping network dependencies and detecting anomalies in TCP health to proactively identify infrastructure bottlenecks.
DNS Resolution Time
Basic2
AppSignal captures DNS resolution time as a standard metric within its Frontend Monitoring (RUM) using the Navigation Timing API, but it lacks the advanced geographic, ISP-level granularity and deep diagnostic intelligence found in more specialized network monitoring solutions.
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DNS Resolution Time measures the latency involved in translating domain names into IP addresses, a critical first step in the connection process that directly impacts end-user experience and page load speeds.

What Score 2 Means

The system includes a basic metric for DNS lookup time within standard transaction traces or synthetic checks, but offers limited granularity regarding nameservers or geographic variances.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to measure or report on DNS resolution latency within its monitoring metrics.
1Monitoring DNS timing requires custom scripting or external agents to execute lookups and push the resulting latency data into the platform via custom metric APIs.
2The system includes a basic metric for DNS lookup time within standard transaction traces or synthetic checks, but offers limited granularity regarding nameservers or geographic variances.
3DNS resolution metrics are fully integrated into Real User Monitoring (RUM) and synthetic dashboards, allowing users to analyze latency trends by region, ISP, and device type with out-of-the-box alerting.
4The solution provides deep diagnostic intelligence for DNS, automatically correlating resolution spikes with specific nameserver providers or misconfigurations and offering predictive insights to optimize connection paths.
SSL/TLS Monitoring
Basic2
AppSignal includes SSL certificate expiration tracking as part of its uptime monitoring suite, but it lacks advanced security analysis such as cipher suite evaluation, weak protocol detection, or automated renewal workflows.
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SSL/TLS Monitoring tracks certificate validity, expiration dates, and configuration health to prevent security warnings and service outages. This ensures encrypted connections remain trusted and compliant without manual oversight.

What Score 2 Means

The platform includes a basic uptime monitor that checks for certificate expiration dates, but lacks detailed inspection of certificate chains, cipher strength, or mixed content warnings.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor SSL/TLS certificate status, expiration, or configuration.
1Users can monitor certificates by writing custom scripts to query endpoints and sending the data to the platform via custom metrics APIs, requiring significant manual configuration.
2The platform includes a basic uptime monitor that checks for certificate expiration dates, but lacks detailed inspection of certificate chains, cipher strength, or mixed content warnings.
3The solution offers robust, out-of-the-box monitoring for expiration, validity, and chain of trust across all discovered services, with integrated alerting and dashboard visualization.
4The system provides market-leading intelligence by analyzing cipher suite security, detecting weak protocols, automating renewal workflows through integrations, and offering predictive insights to eliminate certificate-related downtime entirely.

Database Monitoring

Tracks database health and query performance to optimize data layer responsiveness.

Avg Score
3.0/ 4
Database Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides deep, out-of-the-box visibility into database performance by automatically correlating query execution times and slow query logs with specific application transaction traces.
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Database monitoring tracks the health, performance, and query execution speeds of database instances to prevent bottlenecks and ensure application responsiveness. It is essential for diagnosing slow transactions and optimizing the data layer within the application stack.

What Score 3 Means

The tool offers deep, out-of-the-box visibility into query performance, including slow query logs, throughput, and latency analysis for supported databases, automatically correlating database calls with application traces.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor database performance, query execution, or instance health.
1Database metrics can be ingested via generic log collectors or custom API instrumentation, but users must manually parse query logs and build their own dashboards to visualize performance data.
2Native support provides high-level metrics like CPU usage, memory, and connection counts for common databases. However, it lacks deep query-level visibility, explain plans, or correlation with specific application transactions.
3The tool offers deep, out-of-the-box visibility into query performance, including slow query logs, throughput, and latency analysis for supported databases, automatically correlating database calls with application traces.
4A best-in-class implementation features AI-driven anomaly detection and automated root cause analysis for database issues, providing actionable recommendations for index optimization and query tuning across complex distributed data stores.
Slow Query Analysis
Advanced3
AppSignal automatically aggregates and normalizes database queries, providing performance metrics, frequency counts, and the ability to view EXPLAIN plans alongside the specific transaction traces that triggered them.
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Slow Query Analysis identifies and aggregates database queries that exceed specific latency thresholds, allowing teams to pinpoint the root cause of application bottlenecks. By correlating execution times with specific transactions, it enables targeted optimization of database performance and overall system stability.

What Score 3 Means

The feature automatically aggregates and normalizes slow queries, providing detailed execution plans, frequency counts, and direct correlation to distributed traces for immediate, in-context troubleshooting.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor, capture, or analyze database query performance or execution times.
1Database performance data can be ingested via generic log collectors or APIs, but users must manually parse logs, build custom dashboards, and correlate timestamps to identify slow queries without native visualization.
2The system provides a basic list of queries that take longer than a set threshold, but lacks query normalization, execution plan visualization, or context regarding which application services triggered them.
3The feature automatically aggregates and normalizes slow queries, providing detailed execution plans, frequency counts, and direct correlation to distributed traces for immediate, in-context troubleshooting.
4The platform delivers predictive insights by using machine learning to identify query performance regressions post-deployment and automatically suggests specific index optimizations or query rewrites to resolve bottlenecks.
SQL Performance
Advanced3
AppSignal provides robust SQL monitoring by automatically capturing and sanitizing queries, correlating them with specific transaction traces, and offering a dedicated dashboard for slow queries and N+1 query detection.
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SQL Performance monitoring tracks database query execution times, throughput, and errors to identify slow queries and optimize application responsiveness. This capability is essential for diagnosing database-related bottlenecks that impact overall system stability and user experience.

What Score 3 Means

Strong functionality that automatically captures and sanitizes SQL statements, correlating them with specific application traces and transactions. It offers detailed breakdowns of latency, throughput, and error rates per query, allowing engineers to quickly pinpoint problematic database interactions.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor database queries or SQL execution metrics.
1Database metrics can be ingested via generic log forwarders or custom instrumentation using APIs, but the platform provides no specific visualization or query analysis tools, requiring manual parsing and dashboard creation.
2Native support includes basic metrics such as query throughput and average latency, often presented as a simple list of top slow queries. It lacks deep context like bind variables, execution plans, or correlation with specific application transactions.
3Strong functionality that automatically captures and sanitizes SQL statements, correlating them with specific application traces and transactions. It offers detailed breakdowns of latency, throughput, and error rates per query, allowing engineers to quickly pinpoint problematic database interactions.
4Best-in-class implementation that provides deep database visibility, including visual execution plans, wait-state analysis, and automatic detection of N+1 query patterns. It leverages intelligence to proactively recommend index improvements or schema changes to resolve performance bottlenecks.
NoSQL Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native, out-of-the-box instrumentation for NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Redis, capturing query latency and throughput within transaction traces and pre-built dashboards, though it lacks the proactive schema and indexing recommendations found in market-leading solutions.
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NoSQL Monitoring tracks the health, performance, and resource utilization of non-relational databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, and DynamoDB to ensure data availability and low latency. This capability is critical for diagnosing slow queries, replication lag, and throughput bottlenecks in modern, scalable architectures.

What Score 3 Means

The tool offers comprehensive, out-of-the-box agents for major NoSQL technologies, capturing deep metrics such as query latency, lock contention, and replication status with pre-built dashboards.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor NoSQL databases and lacks integrations for ingesting metrics from non-relational data stores.
1Users must write custom scripts or plugins to query database statistics and ingest them via generic APIs, requiring significant manual effort to visualize data or set up alerts.
2Native integrations exist for common NoSQL databases, but they provide only high-level metrics like up/down status and basic throughput, missing granular details on query performance or cluster health.
3The tool offers comprehensive, out-of-the-box agents for major NoSQL technologies, capturing deep metrics such as query latency, lock contention, and replication status with pre-built dashboards.
4The feature provides intelligent, automated insights, correlating database performance with application traces to pinpoint root causes and offering proactive recommendations for indexing and schema optimization.
Connection Pool Metrics
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native, out-of-the-box instrumentation for major frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Elixir, automatically collecting connection pool metrics such as busy, idle, and waiting connections with pre-built dashboards.
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Connection pool metrics track the health and utilization of database connections, such as active usage, idle threads, and acquisition wait times. This visibility is essential for diagnosing bottlenecks, preventing connection exhaustion, and optimizing application throughput.

What Score 3 Means

The platform offers comprehensive, out-of-the-box instrumentation for major connection pool libraries, capturing detailed metrics like acquisition latency, creation time, and usage histograms within pre-built dashboards.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to collect, store, or visualize metrics related to database connection pools.
1Monitoring connection pools requires heavy lifting, such as manually exposing JMX beans or writing custom code to emit metrics to a generic API endpoint.
2Native support exists for common libraries (e.g., HikariCP) but is limited to basic counters like active and idle connections, lacking depth on latency or wait times.
3The platform offers comprehensive, out-of-the-box instrumentation for major connection pool libraries, capturing detailed metrics like acquisition latency, creation time, and usage histograms within pre-built dashboards.
4Best-in-class implementation that correlates pool saturation with specific traces or slow queries and automatically detects connection leaks with associated stack traces for rapid root cause analysis.
MongoDB Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides robust, production-ready MongoDB monitoring through its language-specific integrations, capturing query performance and automatically correlating database latency with application traces in pre-configured dashboards.
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MongoDB monitoring tracks the health, performance, and resource usage of MongoDB databases, allowing engineering teams to identify slow queries, optimize throughput, and ensure data availability.

What Score 3 Means

The solution offers a robust, pre-configured agent that captures deep metrics including replication status, lock analysis, and query profiling, complete with out-of-the-box dashboards for immediate visualization.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor MongoDB instances or ingest database-specific metrics.
1Users must write custom scripts to poll MongoDB command-line tools (like db.stats) and push metrics via a generic API, with no pre-built dashboards or parsers.
2A basic integration collects high-level infrastructure metrics (CPU, memory) and simple counters (connections, opcounters), but lacks visibility into query performance, replication lag, or specific collection stats.
3The solution offers a robust, pre-configured agent that captures deep metrics including replication status, lock analysis, and query profiling, complete with out-of-the-box dashboards for immediate visualization.
4The feature provides deep code-level insights, automatically correlating database latency with specific application traces, offering automated index recommendations, and supporting complex sharded or serverless Atlas environments seamlessly.

Infrastructure Monitoring

Monitors the health and resources of underlying servers and virtual environments.

Avg Score
2.7/ 4
Infrastructure Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native host metrics for CPU, memory, and disk usage that are fully integrated into its APM dashboards, allowing developers to correlate system-level performance with application traces across various environments including Kubernetes and cloud providers.
View details & rubric context

Infrastructure monitoring tracks the health and performance of underlying servers, containers, and network resources to ensure system stability. It allows engineering teams to correlate hardware and OS-level metrics directly with application performance issues.

What Score 3 Means

Strong, out-of-the-box support for diverse infrastructure including cloud, on-prem, and containers, with metrics fully integrated into the APM UI for seamless correlation between code performance and system health.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to monitor underlying infrastructure components such as servers, containers, or databases, focusing solely on application-level code execution.
1Infrastructure metrics can be ingested via generic APIs or custom scripts, but there are no pre-built agents or integrations, requiring significant manual configuration to visualize host data.
2Native support exists for basic metrics like CPU and memory usage, but the visualization is disconnected from application traces and lacks deep support for modern environments like Kubernetes or serverless.
3Strong, out-of-the-box support for diverse infrastructure including cloud, on-prem, and containers, with metrics fully integrated into the APM UI for seamless correlation between code performance and system health.
4Best-in-class implementation offering automated topology mapping, AI-driven anomaly detection, and predictive capacity planning, providing deep visibility into complex, ephemeral environments with zero manual configuration.
Host Health Metrics
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a native agent that automatically collects high-resolution host metrics including CPU, memory, and disk usage, which are fully integrated into the platform to allow developers to correlate infrastructure health with application performance.
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Host Health Metrics track the resource utilization of underlying physical or virtual servers, including CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network throughput. This visibility allows engineering teams to correlate application performance drops directly with infrastructure bottlenecks.

What Score 3 Means

A robust, native agent collects high-resolution metrics for CPU, memory, disk, and network, fully integrated into the APM view to allow seamless correlation between infrastructure spikes and transaction latency.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to collect or display metrics regarding the underlying host, server, or virtual machine health.
1Users must write custom scripts to scrape system stats (e.g., via generic collectors like StatsD) or build custom API integrations to push host-level data into the system manually.
2The platform provides a basic agent that captures standard metrics like CPU and RAM usage, but data granularity is low (e.g., 1-5 minute intervals) and visualization is siloed from application traces.
3A robust, native agent collects high-resolution metrics for CPU, memory, disk, and network, fully integrated into the APM view to allow seamless correlation between infrastructure spikes and transaction latency.
4The solution utilizes advanced technologies like eBPF for zero-overhead monitoring and applies machine learning to predict resource exhaustion, automatically linking specific processes or containers to infrastructure anomalies.
Virtual Machine Monitoring
Basic2
AppSignal provides native host metrics such as CPU, memory, and disk usage through its agent and correlates this data with application performance, but it lacks deep hypervisor-level integration and granular process-level visibility found in dedicated infrastructure monitoring tools.
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Virtual machine monitoring tracks the health, resource usage, and performance metrics of virtualized infrastructure instances to ensure underlying compute resources effectively support application workloads.

What Score 2 Means

Native agents or integrations exist for common VM providers, but data collection is limited to high-level metrics (up/down status, basic CPU/RAM usage) without granular process visibility or deep historical retention.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to ingest, track, or visualize metrics from virtual machines or hypervisors.
1Users must rely on custom scripts to scrape system metrics (CPU, memory, disk) and send data via generic API endpoints or log ingestion, lacking pre-built dashboards or agents.
2Native agents or integrations exist for common VM providers, but data collection is limited to high-level metrics (up/down status, basic CPU/RAM usage) without granular process visibility or deep historical retention.
3The solution offers deep, out-of-the-box integration with major cloud and on-premise hypervisors, automatically collecting detailed metrics, process-level data, and correlating VM health directly with application performance traces.
4The platform provides predictive analytics to forecast resource exhaustion, automates rightsizing recommendations for cost optimization, and seamlessly maps dynamic VM dependencies across hybrid cloud environments in real-time.
Agentless Monitoring
Basic2
AppSignal provides native agentless support for basic uptime monitoring and availability checks via HTTP, but it requires the installation of proprietary language-specific agents for all other application performance and infrastructure telemetry.
View details & rubric context

Agentless monitoring enables the collection of performance metrics and telemetry from infrastructure and applications without installing proprietary software agents. This approach reduces deployment friction and overhead, providing visibility into environments where installing agents is restricted or impractical.

What Score 2 Means

Native agentless support is available but limited to basic availability checks (ping, HTTP) or high-level metrics from a few specific cloud providers.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to collect telemetry without installing a proprietary agent on the target system.
1Agentless data collection requires users to build custom scripts or collectors to query standard protocols (e.g., SNMP, WMI) and push data to the platform manually.
2Native agentless support is available but limited to basic availability checks (ping, HTTP) or high-level metrics from a few specific cloud providers.
3The platform provides robust, pre-configured integrations for major cloud services, databases, and OS metrics via APIs, offering detailed visibility without host access.
4The solution leverages advanced technologies like eBPF or automated cloud discovery to deliver deep observability, including traces and logs, that rivals agent-based fidelity with zero manual configuration.
Lightweight Agents
Advanced3
AppSignal utilizes a high-performance Rust-based agent designed for minimal overhead and provides robust auto-instrumentation across supported languages, ensuring a consistently low resource footprint in production environments.
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Lightweight agents provide deep application visibility with minimal CPU and memory overhead, ensuring that the monitoring process itself does not degrade the performance of the production environment. This feature is critical for maintaining high-fidelity observability without negatively impacting user experience or infrastructure costs.

What Score 3 Means

The platform offers highly efficient, production-ready agents with auto-instrumentation capabilities that maintain a consistently low footprint and have negligible impact on application throughput.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native agent technology available for instrumentation, requiring users to rely solely on external methods or third-party collectors that may not provide code-level visibility.
1Instrumentation is possible using generic open-source libraries or custom scripts, but achieving a low-overhead configuration requires significant manual tuning and maintenance by the engineering team.
2Native agents are provided for standard languages, but they lack advanced optimization controls and may consume noticeable system resources (CPU/RAM) during high-traffic periods.
3The platform offers highly efficient, production-ready agents with auto-instrumentation capabilities that maintain a consistently low footprint and have negligible impact on application throughput.
4The solution features best-in-class, ultra-lightweight agents (utilizing technologies like eBPF or adaptive sampling) that automatically adjust to system load to guarantee zero-impact monitoring at any scale.
Hybrid Deployment
Advanced3
AppSignal's SaaS-based platform allows agents to be deployed across both on-premises servers and cloud environments, aggregating all performance metrics and transaction traces into a single, unified dashboard. While it provides excellent end-to-end visibility, it lacks the advanced automated discovery of complex hybrid dependencies and predictive cross-environment analytics required for a higher score.
View details & rubric context

Hybrid Deployment allows organizations to monitor applications running across on-premises data centers and public cloud environments within a single unified platform. This ensures consistent visibility and seamless tracing of transactions regardless of the underlying infrastructure.

What Score 3 Means

A fully integrated architecture collects and correlates data from on-premises and cloud sources into a single pane of glass, supporting unified dashboards and end-to-end tracing.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to support hybrid environments, restricting monitoring to either exclusively on-premises or exclusively cloud-based infrastructure.
1Achieving a hybrid view requires running separate instances for on-prem and cloud, then manually aggregating data into a third-party visualization tool via APIs.
2Native support allows agents to run in both environments, but the data remains siloed in separate projects or views, making cross-environment correlation difficult.
3A fully integrated architecture collects and correlates data from on-premises and cloud sources into a single pane of glass, supporting unified dashboards and end-to-end tracing.
4The platform offers intelligent, automated discovery of hybrid dependencies, seamlessly tracing transactions across legacy on-prem systems and cloud-native microservices with predictive analytics for cross-environment latency.

Container & Microservices

Provides visibility into containerized applications and orchestration environments like Kubernetes.

Avg Score
2.4/ 4
Container Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides robust native support for containerized environments, including a dedicated Kubernetes integration that automatically discovers pods and namespaces while correlating resource metrics with application performance traces.
View details & rubric context

Container monitoring provides real-time visibility into the health, resource usage, and performance of containerized applications and orchestration environments like Kubernetes. This capability ensures that dynamic microservices remain stable and efficient by tracking metrics at the cluster, node, and pod levels.

What Score 3 Means

Container monitoring is robust and fully integrated, offering automatic discovery of containers and pods, detailed orchestration metadata (e.g., Kubernetes namespaces, deployments), and seamless correlation between infrastructure metrics and application performance traces.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to track or visualize metrics from containerized environments or orchestration platforms.
1Monitoring containers is possible only by manually configuring generic agents to scrape metrics or by building custom integrations via APIs to ingest data from external container tools.
2The tool offers basic native support, capturing standard CPU and memory metrics for containers, but lacks deep context, orchestration awareness (e.g., Kubernetes events), or correlation with application traces.
3Container monitoring is robust and fully integrated, offering automatic discovery of containers and pods, detailed orchestration metadata (e.g., Kubernetes namespaces, deployments), and seamless correlation between infrastructure metrics and application performance traces.
4The solution provides market-leading observability with eBPF-based auto-instrumentation, predictive scaling insights, and AI-driven anomaly detection that automatically maps dependencies across complex, ephemeral container architectures without manual configuration.
Kubernetes Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a production-ready Kubernetes integration via a DaemonSet that automatically discovers workloads and correlates container-level metrics with application traces, though it lacks the advanced eBPF or AI-driven features of market leaders.
View details & rubric context

Kubernetes monitoring provides real-time visibility into the health and performance of containerized applications and their underlying infrastructure, enabling teams to correlate metrics, logs, and traces across dynamic microservices environments.

What Score 3 Means

The solution offers robust, out-of-the-box Kubernetes monitoring with auto-discovery of clusters and workloads, providing deep visibility into pods and containers while seamlessly correlating infrastructure metrics with application traces.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to ingest, visualize, or analyze data specifically from Kubernetes clusters, nodes, or pods.
1Users can monitor Kubernetes environments only by manually configuring generic agents or writing custom scripts to forward metrics via standard APIs, with no specific metadata support or pre-built dashboards.
2The platform provides a basic integration (e.g., a standard DaemonSet) to collect fundamental node-level metrics like CPU and memory, but lacks granular visibility into pod lifecycles, service dependencies, or specific Kubernetes events.
3The solution offers robust, out-of-the-box Kubernetes monitoring with auto-discovery of clusters and workloads, providing deep visibility into pods and containers while seamlessly correlating infrastructure metrics with application traces.
4The feature delivers market-leading observability through technologies like eBPF for zero-touch instrumentation, AI-driven anomaly detection for ephemeral containers, and automated topology mapping across complex, multi-cloud Kubernetes deployments.
Service Mesh Support
Not Supported0
AppSignal focuses on application-level performance and error tracking for specific programming languages and does not provide native integrations or specialized visualizations for service mesh layers like Istio or Linkerd.
View details & rubric context

Service Mesh Support provides visibility into the communication, latency, and health of microservices managed by infrastructure layers like Istio or Linkerd. This capability allows teams to monitor traffic flows and enforce security policies without requiring instrumentation within individual application code.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no native capability to ingest, visualize, or analyze telemetry specifically from service mesh layers.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to ingest, visualize, or analyze telemetry specifically from service mesh layers.
1Users can achieve visibility by manually configuring sidecars to export metrics to generic endpoints or by building custom parsers for mesh logs. This requires significant maintenance and does not provide a cohesive view of the mesh topology.
2Native integration exists for popular meshes (e.g., Istio, Linkerd) to ingest basic RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) metrics. However, visualization is limited to standard charts without dynamic topology maps or deep correlation with application traces.
3The tool provides strong, out-of-the-box integrations that automatically discover services and generate dynamic topology maps. Mesh telemetry is fully correlated with distributed traces and logs, enabling seamless troubleshooting of inter-service latency and errors.
4Best-in-class support includes zero-configuration auto-instrumentation and intelligent anomaly detection for mesh traffic. It offers advanced visualization for canary deployments, mTLS status, and control plane health, providing strategic insights into microservices architecture optimization.
Microservices Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides comprehensive microservices monitoring through integrated distributed tracing and service maps that visualize dependencies and latency across services, though it lacks the advanced AI-driven predictive insights found in market-leading enterprise platforms.
View details & rubric context

Microservices monitoring provides visibility into distributed architectures by tracking the health, dependencies, and performance of individual services and their interactions. This capability is essential for identifying bottlenecks and troubleshooting latency issues across complex, containerized environments.

What Score 3 Means

The solution provides comprehensive microservices monitoring with auto-discovery, dynamic service maps, and integrated distributed tracing to visualize dependencies and latency across the stack out of the box.

Full Rubric
0The product has no specific capabilities for tracking, visualizing, or monitoring distributed microservices architectures.
1Monitoring microservices is possible only by manually instrumenting code to send custom metrics via generic APIs or by building external dashboards to correlate data from disparate sources.
2The platform offers basic microservices monitoring, providing simple up/down status checks and standard metrics (CPU, memory) for containers, but lacks dynamic service maps or deep distributed tracing context.
3The solution provides comprehensive microservices monitoring with auto-discovery, dynamic service maps, and integrated distributed tracing to visualize dependencies and latency across the stack out of the box.
4The tool delivers market-leading microservices monitoring with AI-driven anomaly detection, automated root cause analysis across complex dependencies, and predictive scaling insights that optimize performance before issues impact users.
Docker Integration
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a production-ready Docker integration that automatically collects container metrics and visualizes them in dedicated dashboards, correlating infrastructure performance with application traces.
View details & rubric context

Docker Integration enables the monitoring of containerized environments by tracking resource usage, health status, and performance metrics across Docker instances. This visibility allows teams to correlate infrastructure constraints with application bottlenecks in real-time.

What Score 3 Means

A fully integrated solution that automatically discovers running containers, captures detailed metadata, and seamlessly correlates container metrics with application traces and logs.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor Docker containers, requiring users to rely entirely on external tools for container visibility.
1Users can ingest Docker metrics only by writing custom scripts to query the Docker API and forwarding data to the APM platform via generic endpoints.
2The platform provides a basic agent that collects standard metrics like CPU and memory usage, but lacks detailed metadata, log correlation, or visualization of short-lived containers.
3A fully integrated solution that automatically discovers running containers, captures detailed metadata, and seamlessly correlates container metrics with application traces and logs.
4The system offers market-leading observability with zero-touch instrumentation, automatically detecting orchestration context and using AI to predict resource exhaustion or anomalies in highly ephemeral container environments.

Serverless Monitoring

Tracks performance and costs of ephemeral functions-as-a-service workloads.

Avg Score
2.3/ 4
Serverless Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal offers dedicated support for AWS Lambda through language-specific libraries that provide deep visibility into function performance, error tracking, and distributed tracing. While it requires adding a package to the codebase, it integrates serverless monitoring directly into the standard APM workflow with detailed insights into execution times and cold starts.
View details & rubric context

Serverless monitoring provides visibility into the performance, cost, and health of functions-as-a-service (FaaS) workloads like AWS Lambda or Azure Functions. This capability is critical for debugging cold starts, optimizing execution time, and tracing distributed transactions across ephemeral infrastructure.

What Score 3 Means

Provides deep visibility through auto-instrumentation layers or libraries, offering distributed tracing, detailed cold-start analysis, and error debugging directly within the APM workflow without manual code changes.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor serverless functions or FaaS environments, requiring users to rely entirely on cloud provider consoles.
1Monitoring serverless functions requires manual instrumentation of code to send metrics via generic APIs or log shippers, with no dedicated dashboards or correlation logic.
2The platform offers native integration to pull basic metrics (invocations, errors, duration) from cloud providers, but lacks deep code-level tracing, payload visibility, or cold-start analysis.
3Provides deep visibility through auto-instrumentation layers or libraries, offering distributed tracing, detailed cold-start analysis, and error debugging directly within the APM workflow without manual code changes.
4Delivers a best-in-class experience with zero-touch instrumentation, automated cost optimization insights, and AI-driven anomaly detection that specifically addresses serverless concurrency limits and architectural patterns.
AWS Lambda Support
Advanced3
AppSignal provides robust, production-ready support for AWS Lambda through dedicated instrumentation and Lambda Layers that enable distributed tracing and cold-start tracking, though it lacks the advanced cost-estimation features found in market-leading serverless specialists.
View details & rubric context

AWS Lambda Support provides deep visibility into serverless function performance by tracking execution times, cold starts, and error rates within a distributed architecture. This capability is essential for troubleshooting complex serverless environments and optimizing costs without managing underlying infrastructure.

What Score 3 Means

The feature includes robust, out-of-the-box instrumentation that provides distributed tracing across Lambda functions and integrates serverless data seamlessly with the broader application topology.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor AWS Lambda functions or ingest specific serverless metrics.
1Users can only monitor Lambda functions by writing custom code to push logs or metrics via generic APIs, or by manually setting up log forwarders without direct integration.
2Native support is available but relies primarily on ingesting standard CloudWatch metrics (invocations, duration, errors) without providing code-level visibility or distributed tracing.
3The feature includes robust, out-of-the-box instrumentation that provides distributed tracing across Lambda functions and integrates serverless data seamlessly with the broader application topology.
4This best-in-class implementation offers zero-configuration instrumentation via Lambda Layers, automatic cold-start analysis, and real-time cost estimation, providing superior insight into serverless efficiency.
Azure Functions Support
DIY1
AppSignal does not offer a dedicated agent or extension for Azure Functions, requiring developers to manually instrument their serverless code using standard language-specific libraries to capture basic telemetry without specialized serverless insights like cold start tracking.
View details & rubric context

Azure Functions support provides critical visibility into serverless applications running on Microsoft Azure, allowing teams to monitor execution times, cold starts, and failure rates. This capability is essential for troubleshooting distributed, event-driven architectures where traditional server monitoring is insufficient.

What Score 1 Means

Users must manually instrument functions using generic libraries or custom API calls to send telemetry data, resulting in high maintenance overhead and potential performance penalties.

Full Rubric
0The product has no specific integration or agent for Azure Functions, rendering serverless executions invisible within the monitoring dashboard.
1Users must manually instrument functions using generic libraries or custom API calls to send telemetry data, resulting in high maintenance overhead and potential performance penalties.
2The tool connects to Azure Monitor to pull basic metrics like invocation counts and failure rates, but lacks code-level profiling or end-to-end distributed tracing context.
3Provides a dedicated agent or extension that automatically instruments Azure Functions, delivering full distributed tracing, code-level profiling, and visibility into bindings and triggers with minimal configuration.
4Delivers market-leading serverless intelligence, automatically correlating cold starts and concurrency issues with user impact, while providing predictive cost analysis and automated optimization recommendations for the Azure environment.

Middleware & Caching

Monitors message queues and caching layers to ensure smooth data flow and speed.

Avg Score
2.7/ 4
Cache Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native, out-of-the-box integrations for caching systems like Redis and Memcached, offering automated dashboards that track hit/miss ratios and command latency without requiring manual configuration.
View details & rubric context

Cache monitoring tracks the health and efficiency of caching layers, such as Redis or Memcached, to optimize data retrieval speeds and reduce database load. It provides critical visibility into hit rates, latency, and eviction patterns necessary for maintaining high-performance applications.

What Score 3 Means

The platform offers deep, out-of-the-box integrations for major caching systems, providing detailed dashboards for hit rates, eviction policies, and command latency without manual setup.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor caching layers or ingest specific cache performance metrics.
1Users must manually instrument their applications or use generic agents to send cache metrics via APIs, requiring significant custom configuration to visualize data.
2Native support covers basic infrastructure stats like CPU and memory for cache nodes, with limited visibility into application-level metrics like hit/miss ratios.
3The platform offers deep, out-of-the-box integrations for major caching systems, providing detailed dashboards for hit rates, eviction policies, and command latency without manual setup.
4A market-leading solution provides granular insights such as hot-key analysis and automated recommendations for sizing, correlated directly with distributed traces to optimize application logic.
Redis Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides automated Redis monitoring via 'Magic Dashboards' that offer out-of-the-box visibility into throughput, latency, and error rates, while seamlessly correlating Redis performance with specific application transaction traces.
View details & rubric context

Redis monitoring tracks critical metrics like memory usage, cache hit rates, and latency to ensure high-performance data caching and storage. It allows engineering teams to identify bottlenecks, optimize configuration, and prevent application slowdowns caused by cache failures.

What Score 3 Means

Delivers a robust, out-of-the-box integration with detailed dashboards for throughput, latency, error rates, and slow logs, along with pre-configured alerts for common saturation points.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native integration for Redis and cannot track specific cache metrics or health indicators.
1Monitoring is possible by sending custom metrics via a generic API or agent, but requires significant manual configuration to map Redis commands to charts.
2Includes a basic plugin or integration that tracks high-level metrics like uptime, connected clients, and total memory usage, but lacks granular visibility into command latency or slow logs.
3Delivers a robust, out-of-the-box integration with detailed dashboards for throughput, latency, error rates, and slow logs, along with pre-configured alerts for common saturation points.
4Offers deep introspection capabilities such as real-time hot key analysis, memory fragmentation visualization, and automated correlation with application traces to pinpoint the exact code causing cache contention.
Message Queue Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native integrations and 'Magic Dashboards' for popular message brokers and background job processors like RabbitMQ and Sidekiq, automatically tracking throughput and latency while correlating queue performance with application traces.
View details & rubric context

Message queue monitoring tracks the health and performance of asynchronous messaging systems like Kafka, RabbitMQ, or SQS to prevent bottlenecks and data loss. It provides visibility into queue depth, consumer lag, and throughput, ensuring decoupled services communicate reliably.

What Score 3 Means

The solution provides deep, out-of-the-box integrations that automatically track critical metrics like consumer lag, throughput, and latency per partition, while correlating queue performance with specific application traces.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor message brokers or queues, offering no visibility into asynchronous communication layers.
1Monitoring queues requires building custom plugins or using generic API checks to ingest metrics, forcing users to manually define metrics and build dashboards from scratch.
2Native support exists for common brokers (e.g., RabbitMQ, Kafka) but is limited to high-level metrics like total queue size and connection counts, lacking visibility into consumer lag or specific partitions.
3The solution provides deep, out-of-the-box integrations that automatically track critical metrics like consumer lag, throughput, and latency per partition, while correlating queue performance with specific application traces.
4The tool offers predictive analytics to forecast queue saturation and auto-scale consumers, along with seamless distributed tracing that visualizes message paths, payload sampling, and dead-letter queue analysis without manual configuration.
Kafka Integration
DIY1
AppSignal provides performance instrumentation for application-level Kafka clients in languages like Ruby and Elixir, but it lacks a native, comprehensive integration for monitoring Kafka cluster health, broker metrics, or consumer lag. To achieve the visibility described in the feature requirements, users must manually instrument their code or send custom metrics to the platform.
View details & rubric context

Kafka Integration enables the monitoring of Apache Kafka clusters, topics, and consumer groups to track throughput, latency, and lag within event-driven architectures. This visibility is critical for diagnosing bottlenecks and ensuring the reliability of real-time data streaming pipelines.

What Score 1 Means

Users must rely on custom plugins, generic JMX exporters, or manual API instrumentation to ingest Kafka metrics, requiring significant configuration and ongoing maintenance.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor Apache Kafka clusters, topics, or consumer groups, leaving a blind spot in streaming infrastructure.
1Users must rely on custom plugins, generic JMX exporters, or manual API instrumentation to ingest Kafka metrics, requiring significant configuration and ongoing maintenance.
2The tool provides a basic connector that tracks high-level broker health and simple throughput metrics but lacks granular visibility into consumer lag, partition offsets, or specific topic performance.
3The integration offers comprehensive, out-of-the-box monitoring for brokers, topics, and consumers, including distributed tracing support that seamlessly correlates transactions as they pass through Kafka queues.
4The platform delivers market-leading observability with automatic topology mapping of producers and consumers, predictive anomaly detection for lag, and deep diagnostic tools for optimizing high-scale streaming performance.
RabbitMQ Integration
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a robust, pre-built RabbitMQ integration that includes automated dashboards and tracks essential metrics such as queue depth and message rates, though it lacks the advanced predictive analytics and complex topology mapping found in market-leading solutions.
View details & rubric context

RabbitMQ integration enables the monitoring of message broker performance, tracking critical metrics like queue depth, throughput, and latency to ensure stability in asynchronous architectures. This visibility helps engineering teams rapidly identify bottlenecks and consumer lag within distributed systems.

What Score 3 Means

The platform provides a robust, pre-built integration that captures detailed metrics per queue and exchange, offering out-of-the-box dashboards for throughput, latency, and error rates.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor RabbitMQ clusters, forcing users to rely on separate, disconnected tools for message queue observability.
1Monitoring RabbitMQ requires significant manual effort, such as writing custom scripts to poll the management API and pushing data into the APM via generic metric ingestion endpoints.
2Native support is available but limited to high-level cluster health checks or aggregate statistics, lacking granular visibility into specific queues, exchanges, or consumer performance.
3The platform provides a robust, pre-built integration that captures detailed metrics per queue and exchange, offering out-of-the-box dashboards for throughput, latency, and error rates.
4The solution offers market-leading observability by automatically correlating distributed traces through RabbitMQ messages, visualizing complex topologies, and providing predictive alerts for queue saturation or consumer stalls.
Middleware Monitoring
Advanced3
AppSignal provides deep, out-of-the-box integrations for common middleware like Sidekiq, Redis, and various web servers through its 'Magic Dashboards,' which automatically track critical metrics like queue depth and latency.
View details & rubric context

Middleware monitoring tracks the performance and health of intermediate software layers like message queues, web servers, and application runtimes to ensure smooth data flow between systems. This visibility helps engineering teams detect bottlenecks, queue backups, and configuration issues that impact overall application reliability.

What Score 3 Means

The platform provides deep, out-of-the-box integrations for a wide array of middleware, automatically capturing critical metrics like queue depth, consumer lag, and thread pool usage within the standard UI.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to monitor middleware components or ingest data from messaging queues and web servers.
1Users can achieve monitoring by writing custom scripts to query middleware status pages or JMX endpoints and sending data via generic APIs, requiring significant maintenance.
2Native integrations exist for common middleware (e.g., Nginx, Tomcat), but data is limited to basic up/down status and simple resource utilization without deep internal metrics.
3The platform provides deep, out-of-the-box integrations for a wide array of middleware, automatically capturing critical metrics like queue depth, consumer lag, and thread pool usage within the standard UI.
4The solution offers auto-discovery and zero-configuration instrumentation for middleware, utilizing AI to predict capacity issues and correlate middleware performance directly with business transactions and code-level traces.

Analytics & Operations

Leverages logs, machine learning, and alerting workflows to detect anomalies, visualize data, and facilitate rapid incident response.

Capability Score
2.28/ 4

Log Management

Centralizes and analyzes logs to correlate system events with performance metrics.

Avg Score
3.0/ 4
Log Management
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a robust, native log management solution that supports structured logging and automatic parsing, with strong correlation between logs, traces, and error reports for streamlined troubleshooting.
View details & rubric context

Log management involves the centralized collection, aggregation, and analysis of application and infrastructure logs to enable rapid troubleshooting and root cause analysis. It allows engineering teams to correlate system events with performance metrics to maintain application reliability.

What Score 3 Means

The platform offers a robust log management suite with automatic parsing of structured logs, dynamic filtering, and seamless correlation between logs, metrics, and traces for unified troubleshooting.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to ingest, store, or view application logs, requiring users to rely entirely on external third-party logging solutions.
1Log data can be ingested via generic API endpoints or webhooks, but requires significant custom instrumentation and lacks a dedicated log viewer, forcing users to build their own parsing and visualization logic.
2Native log ingestion is supported, but functionality is limited to raw text storage and basic keyword search without advanced filtering, structured parsing, or correlation with traces.
3The platform offers a robust log management suite with automatic parsing of structured logs, dynamic filtering, and seamless correlation between logs, metrics, and traces for unified troubleshooting.
4The solution provides best-in-class log management with features like AI-driven anomaly detection, "live tail" streaming, and automatic pattern clustering that instantly surfaces root causes without manual queries.
Log Aggregation
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a fully integrated logging solution that allows for seamless navigation between logs, errors, and performance traces, featuring structured log support and robust filtering capabilities within its unified monitoring interface.
View details & rubric context

Log aggregation centralizes log data from distributed services, servers, and applications into a single searchable repository, enabling engineering teams to correlate events and troubleshoot issues faster.

What Score 3 Means

Log aggregation is fully integrated into the APM workflow, offering robust indexing, powerful query languages, automatic parsing of structured logs, and seamless navigation between logs, metrics, and traces.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to ingest, store, or visualize log data from applications or infrastructure.
1Log data can be sent to the platform via generic API endpoints, but users must write custom scripts or configure third-party shippers manually to format and transmit the data.
2The platform supports basic log ingestion via standard agents, but search capabilities are rudimentary, retention settings are inflexible, and there is no direct linking between logs and APM traces.
3Log aggregation is fully integrated into the APM workflow, offering robust indexing, powerful query languages, automatic parsing of structured logs, and seamless navigation between logs, metrics, and traces.
4The solution offers best-in-class log intelligence, featuring AI-driven anomaly detection, automatic pattern clustering to reduce noise, 'Live Tail' viewing, and instant context correlation without manual tagging.
Contextual Logging
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native log management that automatically correlates logs with traces and errors, allowing developers to view specific log lines directly within the context of a performance trace or error report.
View details & rubric context

Contextual logging correlates raw log data with traces, metrics, and request metadata to provide a unified view of application behavior. This integration allows developers to instantly pivot from performance anomalies to specific log lines, significantly reducing the time required to diagnose root causes.

What Score 3 Means

Strong, fully-integrated functionality where trace IDs are automatically injected into logs for supported languages. Users can seamlessly click from a trace span directly to the specific logs generated by that request.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native log management capabilities or keeps logs entirely siloed without any mechanism to link them to APM data.
1Contextual logging can be achieved by manually configuring log libraries to inject trace IDs and using custom scripts or APIs to query data. Correlation requires significant setup and maintenance by the user.
2Native support exists for viewing logs alongside metrics, but automatic correlation is limited. Users often have to manually filter logs by time windows or server names to match them with traces.
3Strong, fully-integrated functionality where trace IDs are automatically injected into logs for supported languages. Users can seamlessly click from a trace span directly to the specific logs generated by that request.
4Best-in-class implementation that automatically correlates logs, traces, and metrics with zero configuration. It includes AI-driven analysis to highlight anomalous log patterns within the context of performance issues, offering proactive root cause insights.
Log-to-Trace Correlation
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native log-to-trace correlation by automatically injecting trace IDs into logs via its language-specific agents and displaying these logs directly within the context of a performance sample or error trace in the UI.
View details & rubric context

Log-to-Trace Correlation connects application logs directly to distributed traces, allowing engineers to view the specific log entries generated during a transaction's execution. This context is critical for debugging complex microservices issues by pinpointing exactly what happened at the code level during a specific request.

What Score 3 Means

The feature provides strong, out-of-the-box integration where logs are automatically injected with trace context via agents and displayed directly alongside or within the trace waterfall view for immediate context.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to link logs with traces; data exists in completely separate silos with no shared identifiers or navigation.
1Correlation is possible only by manually injecting trace IDs into log patterns via custom code and then manually copying and pasting IDs into the log search interface to find relevant entries.
2Native support exists where the system recognizes trace IDs in logs and offers a basic link to the trace view, but the UI requires switching contexts or tabs, disrupting the debugging flow.
3The feature provides strong, out-of-the-box integration where logs are automatically injected with trace context via agents and displayed directly alongside or within the trace waterfall view for immediate context.
4A best-in-class implementation that not only embeds logs within traces but automatically highlights error logs relevant to latency spikes or failures using AI/ML, enabling instant root cause analysis without manual filtering.
Live Tail
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a production-ready Live Tail feature within its logging tool that allows for real-time streaming, pausing, and filtering by attributes or severity, though it lacks some of the advanced pattern detection found in market-leading specialized logging platforms.
View details & rubric context

Live Tail provides a real-time view of log data as it is ingested, allowing engineers to watch events unfold instantly. This feature is essential for debugging active incidents and monitoring deployments without the latency of standard indexing.

What Score 3 Means

The feature offers a responsive, production-ready Live Tail view with robust filtering, pausing, and search capabilities, allowing developers to isolate specific streams efficiently.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to stream logs in real-time; users must rely on historical search and manual refreshes after indexing delays.
1Real-time streaming is achievable only through external CLI wrappers or direct API polling, requiring developers to leave the platform interface to watch live events.
2A basic Live Tail view is available in the UI, but it suffers from significant latency, lacks granular filtering options, or cannot handle high-volume streams effectively.
3The feature offers a responsive, production-ready Live Tail view with robust filtering, pausing, and search capabilities, allowing developers to isolate specific streams efficiently.
4A market-leading Live Tail implementation that offers sub-second latency even at scale, with advanced features like live pattern detection, multi-attribute filtering, and seamless pivoting to traces or metrics.
Structured Logging
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native support for structured logging by automatically parsing JSON data, enabling users to filter, search, and aggregate based on specific attributes and nested fields. It also excels at correlating logs with traces and errors, though it lacks the advanced machine-learning-driven anomaly detection within log fields required for the highest score.
View details & rubric context

Structured logging captures log data in machine-readable formats like JSON, enabling developers to efficiently query, filter, and aggregate specific fields rather than parsing unstructured text. This capability is critical for rapid debugging and correlating events across distributed systems.

What Score 3 Means

A strong, fully-integrated feature that automatically parses and indexes nested JSON logs with high fidelity, allowing users to filter, aggregate, and visualize data based on any field immediately upon ingestion.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to parse or distinguish structured data formats; it treats all incoming logs as flat, unstructured text strings.
1Structured logging is possible but requires heavy lifting, such as writing complex custom regular expressions (regex) to extract fields or using external log shippers to pre-process and format data before ingestion.
2Native support exists for common formats like JSON, but it is minimal; the system may only index top-level fields, struggle with nested objects, or lack schema enforcement.
3A strong, fully-integrated feature that automatically parses and indexes nested JSON logs with high fidelity, allowing users to filter, aggregate, and visualize data based on any field immediately upon ingestion.
4A best-in-class implementation that handles high-cardinality fields effortlessly, automatically correlates structured attributes with traces and metrics, and uses machine learning to detect anomalies within specific log fields.

AIOps & Analytics

Uses machine learning to detect anomalies, reduce noise, and automate remediation.

Avg Score
1.4/ 4
Anomaly Detection
Not Supported0
AppSignal's alerting system is fundamentally based on manually configured static thresholds, with no native support for automated anomaly detection or dynamic baselining of performance metrics.
View details & rubric context

Anomaly detection automatically identifies deviations from historical performance baselines to surface potential issues without manual threshold configuration. This capability allows engineering teams to proactively address performance regressions and reliability incidents before they impact end users.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no built-in capability to detect anomalies or deviations from baselines automatically; all alerting relies strictly on static, manually defined thresholds.

Full Rubric
0The product has no built-in capability to detect anomalies or deviations from baselines automatically; all alerting relies strictly on static, manually defined thresholds.
1Anomaly detection is possible only by exporting raw metrics to external analysis tools or by writing custom scripts against the API to calculate deviations and trigger alerts outside the platform.
2Native anomaly detection is available but limited to simple statistical deviations (e.g., standard deviation) on a restricted set of metrics. It lacks seasonality awareness, leading to frequent false positives or missed events during expected traffic spikes.
3The system provides robust, out-of-the-box anomaly detection with seasonality awareness and adaptive baselining across all metrics. It is fully integrated into the alerting UI, allowing teams to easily replace static thresholds with dynamic monitoring.
4The platform employs advanced machine learning to correlate anomalies across the full stack, automatically grouping related events to pinpoint root causes and suppress noise. It offers predictive capabilities to forecast incidents before they occur and suggests specific remediation steps.
Dynamic Baselining
Not Supported0
AppSignal relies on manually configured static thresholds for its alerting system and does not currently offer native functionality to automatically calculate dynamic baselines based on historical seasonality or machine learning.
View details & rubric context

Dynamic baselining automatically calculates expected performance ranges based on historical data and seasonality, allowing teams to detect anomalies without manually configuring static thresholds. This reduces alert fatigue by distinguishing between normal traffic spikes and genuine performance degradation.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no capability to calculate baselines automatically; users must rely entirely on static, manually configured thresholds for alerting.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to calculate baselines automatically; users must rely entirely on static, manually configured thresholds for alerting.
1Users can achieve baselining only by exporting metrics to external analytics tools or writing custom scripts to calculate averages and push them back as reference lines via APIs.
2Native support exists but is limited to simple moving averages or linear regression over short timeframes, lacking awareness of complex seasonality (e.g., day-of-week patterns).
3The feature offers robust algorithms that account for daily and weekly seasonality, automatically adjusting thresholds and allowing users to alert on standard deviations directly within the UI.
4Best-in-class implementation uses advanced machine learning to handle complex seasonality and holidays, offering adaptive learning rates and correlating baseline deviations across dependent services for instant root cause analysis.
Predictive Analytics
DIY1
AppSignal focuses on real-time monitoring and error tracking without native machine learning forecasting; users must export metric data via the API to external tools to perform predictive analysis or trend forecasting.
View details & rubric context

Predictive analytics utilizes historical performance data and machine learning algorithms to forecast potential system bottlenecks and anomalies before they impact end-users. This capability allows engineering teams to shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive capacity planning and incident prevention.

What Score 1 Means

Forecasting requires exporting raw metric data via APIs to external data science tools or writing custom scripts to perform regression analysis manually.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to forecast future performance trends or predict potential incidents based on historical data.
1Forecasting requires exporting raw metric data via APIs to external data science tools or writing custom scripts to perform regression analysis manually.
2Native support includes basic linear trending or simple capacity planning projections based on static thresholds, but lacks sophisticated machine learning models or seasonality adjustments.
3The platform offers built-in machine learning models that account for seasonality and cyclic patterns to accurately forecast resource saturation and performance degradation without manual configuration.
4Predictive analytics are deeply integrated with automation to trigger auto-scaling or remediation actions before incidents occur, offering "what-if" scenario modeling and correlation with business impact metrics.
Smart Alerting
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native anomaly detection that uses historical data to set dynamic thresholds and integrates seamlessly with platforms like PagerDuty and Slack, though it lacks the predictive AI and complex topology-aware correlation of market leaders.
View details & rubric context

Smart Alerting utilizes machine learning and dynamic baselining to detect anomalies and distinguish critical incidents from system noise, reducing alert fatigue for engineering teams. By correlating events and automating threshold adjustments, it ensures notifications are actionable and relevant.

What Score 3 Means

The feature includes dynamic baselines, anomaly detection, and alert grouping to reduce noise, integrating natively with common incident management platforms like PagerDuty or Slack.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to generate alerts or notifications based on metric changes or performance anomalies.
1Alerting logic must be built externally by the user, relying on custom scripts to poll APIs for data or generic webhooks that require significant configuration to trigger notifications.
2Native alerting exists but is limited to static, manually defined thresholds (e.g., fixed CPU percentage) without dynamic baselining, leading to potential false positives or negatives.
3The feature includes dynamic baselines, anomaly detection, and alert grouping to reduce noise, integrating natively with common incident management platforms like PagerDuty or Slack.
4A market-leading implementation uses predictive AI to forecast issues before they occur, automatically correlates alerts across the stack to pinpoint root causes, and supports topology-aware noise suppression.
Noise Reduction
Advanced3
AppSignal provides robust native error grouping and deduplication that automatically consolidates similar exceptions into single incidents, complemented by configurable ignore lists and anomaly detection to reduce alert fatigue.
View details & rubric context

Noise reduction capabilities filter out false positives and correlate related events, ensuring engineering teams focus on actionable insights rather than being overwhelmed by alert fatigue.

What Score 3 Means

The platform offers robust, built-in alert grouping and deduplication based on defined rules and dynamic baselines, effectively reducing false positives within the standard workflow.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to filter, group, or suppress alerts, resulting in raw event streams that often cause significant alert fatigue.
1Noise reduction is only possible by exporting raw alert data via APIs or webhooks to external tools or custom scripts where users must manually build logic to filter out irrelevant events.
2Native support includes basic static thresholds or manual maintenance windows to suppress alerts, but lacks intelligent grouping or dynamic deduplication capabilities.
3The platform offers robust, built-in alert grouping and deduplication based on defined rules and dynamic baselines, effectively reducing false positives within the standard workflow.
4A best-in-class AIOps engine automatically correlates vast amounts of telemetry data into single incidents, using machine learning to identify root causes and suppress noise with zero manual configuration.
Automated Remediation
DIY1
AppSignal focuses on monitoring and alerting rather than native orchestration, requiring users to configure generic webhooks to trigger external scripts or third-party automation tools for any automated remediation.
View details & rubric context

Automated remediation enables the system to autonomously trigger corrective actions, such as restarting services or scaling resources, when performance anomalies are detected. This capability significantly reduces downtime and mean time to resolution (MTTR) by handling routine incidents without human intervention.

What Score 1 Means

Automated responses can be achieved only by configuring generic webhooks to trigger external scripts or third-party automation tools, requiring significant custom coding and maintenance.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to trigger actions or scripts in response to alerts, requiring all remediation to be performed manually by operators.
1Automated responses can be achieved only by configuring generic webhooks to trigger external scripts or third-party automation tools, requiring significant custom coding and maintenance.
2The platform provides basic native actions, such as restarting a process or executing a simple local script, but lacks workflow orchestration, audit trails, or integration with broader infrastructure management tools.
3A fully integrated remediation engine supports multi-step workflows, role-based access control, and deep integrations with orchestration platforms like Kubernetes or Ansible for production-grade incident response.
4The solution features intelligent, self-healing capabilities that use AI to predict issues and autonomously execute complex remediation strategies, including safety checks, rollbacks, and detailed impact analysis.
Pattern Recognition
Basic2
AppSignal provides native error grouping and anomaly detection alerts based on metric deviations, but it primarily relies on user-defined thresholds rather than advanced, automated machine learning for cross-signal correlation and seasonality.
View details & rubric context

Pattern recognition utilizes machine learning algorithms to automatically identify recurring trends, anomalies, and correlations within telemetry data, enabling teams to proactively address performance issues before they escalate.

What Score 2 Means

Basic pattern recognition is supported through static thresholds or simple log grouping, but it lacks dynamic baselining or cross-signal correlation.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to detect trends, anomalies, or recurring patterns in telemetry data, requiring users to manually inspect charts and logs.
1Pattern detection is possible only by exporting data to third-party analytics tools or by writing complex, custom queries and scripts to manually correlate data points.
2Basic pattern recognition is supported through static thresholds or simple log grouping, but it lacks dynamic baselining or cross-signal correlation.
3The platform features integrated machine learning that automatically detects anomalies and seasonality, correlating patterns across metrics and logs with minimal configuration.
4Best-in-class pattern recognition offers predictive analytics and automated root cause analysis, proactively surfacing complex, multi-service dependencies and preventing incidents before they impact users.

Alerting & Incident Response

Manages notifications and workflows to ensure rapid response to critical issues.

Avg Score
3.0/ 4
Alerting System
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a robust alerting system that supports anomaly detection for dynamic thresholds, extensive multi-channel integrations including Slack and PagerDuty, and alert grouping to manage notification noise effectively.
View details & rubric context

An alerting system proactively notifies engineering teams when performance metrics deviate from established baselines or errors occur, ensuring rapid incident response and minimizing downtime.

What Score 3 Means

The system offers comprehensive alerting with support for dynamic baselines, multi-channel integrations (e.g., Slack, PagerDuty), and alert grouping to reduce noise.

Full Rubric
0The product has no built-in capability to trigger notifications or alerts based on performance metrics or error thresholds.
1Alerting is possible only by building external scripts that poll the APM's API for metric data and trigger notifications through third-party tools.
2Native alerting exists but is limited to static thresholds on single metrics and basic notification channels like email, lacking support for complex conditions or anomaly detection.
3The system offers comprehensive alerting with support for dynamic baselines, multi-channel integrations (e.g., Slack, PagerDuty), and alert grouping to reduce noise.
4The solution provides AI-driven predictive alerting and anomaly detection that automatically correlates events to pinpoint root causes, significantly reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) without manual configuration.
Incident Management
Basic2
AppSignal provides a centralized dashboard to track, acknowledge, and resolve performance and error incidents, but it lacks native on-call scheduling and complex escalation workflows, relying instead on third-party integrations for those advanced capabilities.
View details & rubric context

Incident management enables engineering teams to detect, triage, and resolve application performance issues efficiently to minimize downtime. It centralizes alerting, on-call scheduling, and response workflows to ensure service level agreements (SLAs) are maintained.

What Score 2 Means

The system provides a basic list of triggered alerts with simple status toggles (e.g., acknowledged, resolved), but lacks on-call scheduling, complex escalation rules, or deep integration with collaboration tools.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native functionality for tracking, assigning, or managing the lifecycle of performance incidents.
1Users can trigger external incidents via generic webhooks or API calls, but all workflow logic, routing, and status tracking must be handled in a separate, unconnected system.
2The system provides a basic list of triggered alerts with simple status toggles (e.g., acknowledged, resolved), but lacks on-call scheduling, complex escalation rules, or deep integration with collaboration tools.
3A fully integrated incident response hub includes on-call scheduling, multi-stage escalation policies, and deep integrations with chat ops (Slack/Teams) and ticketing systems for seamless end-to-end resolution.
4The platform utilizes AIOps to correlate alerts into single actionable incidents, predicts potential outages before they occur, and offers automated runbook execution to remediate known issues instantly.
Jira Integration
Best4
AppSignal provides a robust Jira integration that supports automated ticket creation, deep linking, and bi-directional synchronization where closing a Jira issue can automatically resolve the corresponding incident in AppSignal.
View details & rubric context

Jira integration enables engineering teams to seamlessly create, track, and synchronize issue tickets directly from performance alerts and error logs. This capability streamlines incident response by bridging the gap between technical observability data and project management workflows.

What Score 4 Means

Offers a market-leading bi-directional sync where status changes in Jira automatically resolve alerts in the APM tool, along with intelligent grouping of related errors into single tickets to prevent noise.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native integration with Jira and offers no built-in mechanism to export alerts or issues to the platform.
1Integration requires heavy lifting via generic webhooks or custom scripts that manually format and send JSON payloads to the Jira API to create tickets.
2A native plugin exists, but it provides only basic functionality, such as manually clicking a button to create a ticket with a static title and description, lacking automation or field customization.
3The integration is fully configurable, allowing for automated ticket creation based on specific alert thresholds, support for custom field mapping, and deep linking back to the APM dashboard.
4Offers a market-leading bi-directional sync where status changes in Jira automatically resolve alerts in the APM tool, along with intelligent grouping of related errors into single tickets to prevent noise.
PagerDuty Integration
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a native PagerDuty integration that supports automatic incident triggering and resolution syncing, allowing users to route specific alert types to different PagerDuty services with contextual links back to the performance traces.
View details & rubric context

PagerDuty Integration allows the APM platform to automatically trigger incidents and notify on-call teams when performance thresholds are breached. This ensures critical system issues are immediately routed to the right responders for rapid resolution.

What Score 3 Means

The integration offers seamless setup via OAuth, allowing for granular mapping of alert severities to PagerDuty urgency levels and customizable payload details for better context.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to integrate with PagerDuty for incident management or alerting.
1Integration is possible only by manually configuring generic webhooks to hit PagerDuty's API or writing custom middleware to bridge the two systems.
2A native integration exists but is limited to sending basic, static alert payloads to PagerDuty without customizable fields or advanced routing logic.
3The integration offers seamless setup via OAuth, allowing for granular mapping of alert severities to PagerDuty urgency levels and customizable payload details for better context.
4The integration features deep bi-directional syncing where actions in one platform reflect in the other, along with rich context embedding (snapshots, logs) and automated remediation triggers.
Slack Integration
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a native Slack integration that supports rich message formatting, granular routing to specific channels based on alert types, and interactive buttons to acknowledge or ignore errors directly within the Slack interface.
View details & rubric context

Slack integration allows APM tools to push real-time alerts and performance metrics directly into team channels, facilitating faster incident response and collaborative troubleshooting.

What Score 3 Means

The integration supports rich message formatting with snapshots or graphs, allows granular routing to different channels based on alert severity, and enables basic interactivity like acknowledging alerts.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native integration with Slack and offers no specific mechanisms to route alerts to the platform.
1Connectivity relies on generic webhooks or custom scripts, requiring engineering effort to format JSON payloads and manage authentication to post updates to Slack.
2A native integration is available, but it is limited to broadcasting static text-based alerts to a pre-defined channel with little to no formatting or routing flexibility.
3The integration supports rich message formatting with snapshots or graphs, allows granular routing to different channels based on alert severity, and enables basic interactivity like acknowledging alerts.
4The solution offers a full ChatOps experience with bi-directional functionality, allowing teams to query metrics, trigger remediation runbooks, and manage incident states without leaving the Slack interface.
Webhook Support
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a native webhook integration that allows users to configure destination URLs, add custom HTTP headers for authentication, and includes a 'Test' button to verify connectivity.
View details & rubric context

Webhook support enables the APM platform to send real-time HTTP callbacks to external systems when specific events or alerts are triggered, facilitating automated incident response and seamless integration with third-party tools.

What Score 3 Means

The feature provides a full UI for configuring webhooks, including support for custom HTTP headers, authentication methods, payload customization, and a 'test now' button to verify connectivity.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to trigger outbound HTTP requests or webhooks based on system events or alerts.
1Integration requires building custom middleware that polls the APM's API for data changes or relies on generic script execution features to manually construct HTTP requests.
2Native webhook support exists but is rigid, offering only a fixed JSON payload structure and a destination URL field without options for custom headers, authentication, or payload formatting.
3The feature provides a full UI for configuring webhooks, including support for custom HTTP headers, authentication methods, payload customization, and a 'test now' button to verify connectivity.
4The implementation offers enterprise-grade reliability with automatic retries, exponential backoff, detailed delivery history logs, HMAC request signing for security, and advanced payload templating logic.

Visualization & Reporting

Provides customizable views and reports to share insights with stakeholders.

Avg Score
1.8/ 4
Custom Dashboards
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a robust drag-and-drop dashboard builder that supports custom metrics, template libraries for common frameworks, and 'dashboards as code' via their API and Terraform provider, though it lacks the AI-driven suggestions and real-time collaborative editing found in market-leading tools.
View details & rubric context

Custom dashboards allow engineering teams to visualize specific metrics, logs, and traces relevant to their unique application architecture. This flexibility ensures stakeholders can monitor critical KPIs and correlate data points without being restricted to generic, pre-built views.

What Score 3 Means

The platform provides a robust, drag-and-drop dashboard builder supporting complex queries and mixed data types (logs, metrics, traces). It includes template libraries, variable-based filtering, and role-based sharing permissions.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to create user-defined views or modify existing displays, forcing users to rely entirely on static, vendor-provided screens.
1Custom visualization is only possible by exporting data to third-party tools (like Grafana) via APIs or raw data exports, requiring significant setup and maintenance outside the core APM platform.
2Users can create basic dashboards using a limited library of pre-set widgets and metrics. Layout customization is rigid, and the dashboards lack advanced features like cross-data correlation or dynamic filtering variables.
3The platform provides a robust, drag-and-drop dashboard builder supporting complex queries and mixed data types (logs, metrics, traces). It includes template libraries, variable-based filtering, and role-based sharing permissions.
4Dashboarding is best-in-class, featuring 'dashboards as code' for version control, AI-driven widget suggestions based on anomaly detection, and real-time collaborative editing. It supports granular public sharing and deep interactivity for root cause analysis directly from the chart.
Historical Data Analysis
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native long-term data retention, typically offering 30 days for detailed traces and up to 13 months for aggregated metrics, allowing users to visualize trends and compare historical timeframes directly within the platform.
View details & rubric context

Historical Data Analysis enables teams to retain and query performance metrics over extended periods to identify long-term trends, seasonality, and regression patterns. This capability is essential for accurate capacity planning, compliance auditing, and debugging intermittent issues that span weeks or months.

What Score 3 Means

The platform offers configurable retention policies extending to months or years with high-fidelity data preservation, allowing users to seamlessly query and visualize past performance trends directly within the dashboard.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to store or retrieve historical performance data beyond a real-time or ephemeral window (e.g., last 1 hour), making trend analysis impossible.
1Long-term analysis requires manually exporting metric data via APIs or log streams to an external data warehouse or storage solution for retention and querying outside the platform.
2Native retention is supported but limited to a short fixed window (e.g., 7 to 14 days) with aggressive downsampling that obscures granular details for older data.
3The platform offers configurable retention policies extending to months or years with high-fidelity data preservation, allowing users to seamlessly query and visualize past performance trends directly within the dashboard.
4Offers cost-effective, unlimited retention with intelligent rehydration of archived data, automatically detecting seasonality and long-term anomalies to drive predictive capacity planning without performance degradation during queries.
Real-Time Visualization
Basic2
AppSignal provides native dashboards that update automatically, but it primarily operates on one-minute data aggregation intervals rather than offering the sub-second streaming latency and high-fidelity live-mode toggles required for a higher score.
View details & rubric context

Real-time visualization provides live, streaming dashboards of application metrics and traces, allowing engineering teams to spot anomalies and react to incidents the instant they occur. This capability ensures performance monitoring reflects the immediate state of the system rather than delayed historical averages.

What Score 2 Means

The platform offers a basic "live mode" view, but it is limited to a few pre-defined metrics (like CPU or throughput) and cannot be customized or applied to general dashboards.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to stream live data or update dashboards in real-time, relying entirely on static reports or manual page refreshes.
1Real-time views are not native; users must build custom front-ends consuming raw API streams or configure complex third-party plugins to achieve near-live updates.
2The platform offers a basic "live mode" view, but it is limited to a few pre-defined metrics (like CPU or throughput) and cannot be customized or applied to general dashboards.
3Real-time visualization is a core capability, allowing users to toggle live streaming on most custom dashboards and charts with sub-second latency and smooth rendering.
4The system provides an immersive, high-fidelity live operations center that automatically highlights emerging anomalies in real-time streams, integrating topology maps and distributed traces without performance degradation.
Heatmaps
Not Supported0
AppSignal does not currently offer native heatmap visualizations for infrastructure or transaction latency, focusing instead on line charts, percentiles, and distribution histograms to represent performance data.
View details & rubric context

Heatmaps provide a visual aggregation of system performance data, enabling engineers to instantly identify outliers, latency patterns, and resource bottlenecks across complex infrastructure. This visualization is essential for detecting anomalies in high-volume environments that standard line charts often obscure.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no native capability to render heatmaps for infrastructure nodes, transaction latency, or other performance metrics.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to render heatmaps for infrastructure nodes, transaction latency, or other performance metrics.
1Heatmap visualizations can only be achieved by exporting metric data to external visualization tools or by building custom dashboard widgets using generic API data sources.
2Native support exists but is limited to pre-configured views (e.g., host health only) with fixed thresholds and minimal interactivity. Users cannot easily apply heatmaps to custom metrics or arbitrary dimensions.
3Strong, interactive heatmaps allow users to visualize arbitrary metrics across any dimension, with drill-down capabilities linking directly to traces or logs. The feature supports custom color scaling and integrates fully with dashboarding workflows.
4Best-in-class implementation utilizes high-cardinality rendering and AI-driven anomaly detection to automatically surface hidden patterns. It offers real-time, multidimensional slicing and intuitive navigation that significantly reduces time-to-resolution for complex distributed systems.
PDF Reporting
DIY1
AppSignal lacks a native PDF export or reporting engine, requiring users to rely on browser-based 'Print to PDF' functionality or external data extraction to create portable documents.
View details & rubric context

PDF Reporting enables the export of performance metrics and dashboards into portable documents, facilitating offline sharing and compliance documentation. This feature ensures stakeholders receive consistent snapshots of system health without requiring direct access to the monitoring platform.

What Score 1 Means

Users must rely on browser-based 'Print to PDF' functionality which often breaks layout, or extract data via APIs to generate reports using external third-party tools.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to generate or export reports in PDF format.
1Users must rely on browser-based 'Print to PDF' functionality which often breaks layout, or extract data via APIs to generate reports using external third-party tools.
2Native PDF export is available, but it is limited to static snapshots of current dashboard views with no customization options or scheduling capabilities.
3The system supports fully customizable PDF reports that can be scheduled for automatic email delivery, allowing users to select specific metrics, time ranges, and visual layouts.
4PDF generation includes advanced white-labeling, AI-driven executive summaries, and granular role-based distribution logic, ensuring highly professional and context-aware documents for external stakeholders.
Scheduled Reports
Basic2
AppSignal provides a standard weekly report email that summarizes application performance and error rates, but it lacks the flexibility to create custom scheduled reports with user-defined metrics, intervals, or advanced formatting.
View details & rubric context

Scheduled reports allow teams to automatically generate and distribute performance summaries, uptime statistics, and error rate trends to stakeholders at predefined intervals. This ensures critical metrics are visible to management and engineering teams without requiring manual dashboard checks.

What Score 2 Means

The platform offers basic functionality to email a static snapshot of a dashboard at a fixed interval (e.g., daily or weekly), but lacks customization in formatting, recipient management, or dynamic filtering.

Full Rubric
0The product has no built-in capability to schedule or automatically distribute reports via email or other channels.
1Users must build their own reporting engine by querying the APM's API to extract data and using external scripts or cron jobs to format and send reports.
2The platform offers basic functionality to email a static snapshot of a dashboard at a fixed interval (e.g., daily or weekly), but lacks customization in formatting, recipient management, or dynamic filtering.
3Users can easily schedule detailed, customizable PDF or HTML reports with granular control over time ranges, recipient groups, and specific metrics, fully integrated into the dashboarding UI.
4The system offers intelligent reporting that highlights anomalies and trends automatically within the output, supports multi-channel delivery (Email, Slack, Teams), and allows for conditional scheduling based on specific performance thresholds.

Platform & Integrations

Manages data governance, security, and external connections to integrate observability into the broader development lifecycle.

Capability Score
2.13/ 4

Data Strategy

Manages data collection, retention, and organization for effective observability.

Avg Score
1.8/ 4
Auto-Discovery
Advanced3
AppSignal provides strong out-of-the-box discovery through its language-specific agents, which automatically identify application dependencies, databases, and external APIs to generate 'Magic Dashboards' immediately upon installation.
View details & rubric context

Auto-discovery automatically identifies and maps application services, infrastructure components, and dependencies as soon as an agent is installed, eliminating manual configuration to ensure real-time visibility into dynamic environments.

What Score 3 Means

The solution provides strong out-of-the-box discovery, automatically identifying services, containers, and dependencies immediately upon agent installation with accurate topology mapping.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to automatically detect services or infrastructure components, requiring manual entry or static configuration for every monitored entity.
1Dynamic detection is possible but requires custom scripting against APIs or heavy reliance on external configuration management tools to register new services as they come online.
2Native auto-discovery exists but is limited to basic host or process detection; it often fails to automatically map complex dependencies or requires manual tagging to categorize services correctly.
3The solution provides strong out-of-the-box discovery, automatically identifying services, containers, and dependencies immediately upon agent installation with accurate topology mapping.
4The system offers best-in-class, continuous discovery that instantly recognizes ephemeral resources, third-party APIs, and cloud services, dynamically updating topology maps and alerting contexts in real-time without human intervention.
Capacity Planning
Not Supported0
AppSignal provides robust real-time and historical host metrics and performance data, but it lacks native predictive forecasting or automated capacity planning tools to estimate future resource requirements.
View details & rubric context

Capacity planning enables teams to forecast future resource requirements based on historical usage trends, ensuring infrastructure scales efficiently to meet demand without over-provisioning.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no native capability to forecast resource usage or assist with capacity planning, offering only real-time or historical views without predictive insights.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to forecast resource usage or assist with capacity planning, offering only real-time or historical views without predictive insights.
1Capacity planning requires exporting raw metric data to external tools or building custom scripts against the API to calculate trends and forecast future resource needs manually.
2Native capacity planning is limited to simple linear projections based on single metrics (like CPU or memory) over fixed timeframes, lacking support for seasonality or complex dependencies.
3The solution offers robust capacity planning with built-in forecasting models that account for seasonality and multiple resource types, providing integrated dashboards that visualize time-to-saturation.
4The platform delivers market-leading capacity planning using AI/ML to predict saturation points with high accuracy, automatically correlating infrastructure metrics with business KPIs and proactively suggesting rightsizing actions.
Tagging and Labeling
Basic2
AppSignal provides native support for custom sample tags that allow users to filter errors and performance traces, but it lacks the automated, deep integration with cloud provider and orchestrator metadata required for a higher score.
View details & rubric context

Tagging and Labeling allow users to attach metadata to telemetry data and infrastructure components, enabling precise filtering, aggregation, and correlation across complex distributed systems.

What Score 2 Means

Native support allows for basic static key-value pairs on hosts or services, but tags may not propagate consistently across all telemetry types or lack dynamic updates.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to assign custom tags or labels to monitored resources, metrics, or traces.
1Tagging can be achieved by manually injecting metadata into payloads via custom code or generic APIs, but there is no native management or automatic discovery of environment tags.
2Native support allows for basic static key-value pairs on hosts or services, but tags may not propagate consistently across all telemetry types or lack dynamic updates.
3The platform automatically ingests tags from cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure) and orchestrators (Kubernetes), making them immediately available for filtering dashboards, alerts, and traces without manual configuration.
4A best-in-class implementation supporting high-cardinality tagging with automated normalization, intelligent propagation across the full stack (trace-to-log), and governance tools to enforce tagging standards.
Data Granularity
Basic2
AppSignal provides native support for standard 1-minute metric buckets across its performance and host monitoring, but it lacks the sub-minute or 1-second historical granularity required for advanced high-fidelity analysis of transient spikes.
View details & rubric context

Data granularity defines the frequency and resolution at which performance metrics are collected and stored, determining the ability to detect transient spikes. High-fidelity data is essential for identifying micro-bursts and anomalies that are often hidden by averages in lower-resolution monitoring.

What Score 2 Means

Native support exists for standard granularities (e.g., 1-minute buckets), but sub-minute or 1-second resolution is either unavailable or restricted to a fleeting "live view" that is not retained for historical analysis.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to capture high-resolution metrics, relying exclusively on heavily aggregated data (e.g., 5-minute or 1-minute averages) that obscures short-lived performance issues.
1High-fidelity analysis requires heavy lifting, such as manually querying raw API endpoints or configuring custom log-based metric generation, as the primary UI defaults to low-resolution rollups.
2Native support exists for standard granularities (e.g., 1-minute buckets), but sub-minute or 1-second resolution is either unavailable or restricted to a fleeting "live view" that is not retained for historical analysis.
3The platform natively supports high-resolution metrics (e.g., 1-second or 10-second intervals) retained for a useful debugging window (e.g., several days), allowing users to zoom in and analyze spikes without data smoothing.
4Offers market-leading 1-second granularity with extended retention periods and intelligent storage engines that automatically preserve statistical outliers and micro-bursts even when general historical data is downsampled.
Data Retention Policies
Basic2
AppSignal provides native data retention settings that are primarily determined by the user's selected pricing plan, offering a global retention period for the application rather than granular, per-data-type configuration for metrics, logs, and traces.
View details & rubric context

Data retention policies allow organizations to define how long performance data, logs, and traces are stored before being deleted or archived, which is critical for compliance, historical analysis, and cost management.

What Score 2 Means

Native support exists but is minimal, offering only a global retention setting that applies broadly across the account without the ability to differentiate between metrics, logs, or traces.

Full Rubric
0The product has no configurable data retention settings, enforcing a single, immutable retention period for all data types regardless of compliance needs or storage constraints.
1Retention management requires heavy lifting, relying on custom scripts to export and purge data via APIs or manual processes to move data to external storage for long-term archiving.
2Native support exists but is minimal, offering only a global retention setting that applies broadly across the account without the ability to differentiate between metrics, logs, or traces.
3Strong, granular functionality allows users to configure specific retention periods for different data types, services, or environments directly through the UI to balance visibility with cost.
4Best-in-class implementation includes automated data lifecycle management with multi-tiered storage options (hot/warm/cold) and instant re-hydration capabilities, optimizing costs while maintaining seamless access to historical data.

Security & Compliance

Ensures data privacy, access control, and regulatory compliance within the platform.

Avg Score
2.3/ 4
Role-Based Access Control
Basic2
AppSignal provides native support for pre-defined roles such as Owner, Admin, and Member, and allows users to be restricted to specific applications via Teams; however, it lacks the ability to create custom roles with granular, feature-level permission toggles.
View details & rubric context

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enables organizations to define granular permissions for viewing performance data and modifying configurations based on user responsibilities. This ensures operational security by restricting sensitive telemetry and administrative actions to authorized personnel.

What Score 2 Means

Native support is limited to a few static, pre-defined roles (e.g., Admin vs. Viewer) without the ability to customize permissions or scope access to specific applications or environments.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to restrict access based on roles, treating all users with the same level of privileges or a single shared login.
1Access restrictions must be implemented via external proxies, identity provider workarounds, or custom API gateways to filter data, as the tool lacks native internal role management.
2Native support is limited to a few static, pre-defined roles (e.g., Admin vs. Viewer) without the ability to customize permissions or scope access to specific applications or environments.
3The platform offers robust custom role creation, allowing granular control over specific features, environments, and data sets, fully integrated with SSO group mapping for seamless user management.
4Best-in-class implementation supports dynamic Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC), temporary elevated access workflows, and automated governance features for managing permissions at enterprise scale.
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Advanced3
AppSignal provides robust native support for SAML 2.0 with pre-configured setups for major providers like Okta and Azure AD, including Just-in-Time (JIT) provisioning and role mapping, but it lacks SCIM support for automated deprovisioning.
View details & rubric context

Single Sign-On (SSO) enables users to authenticate using centralized credentials from an existing identity provider, ensuring secure access control and simplifying user management. This capability is essential for maintaining security compliance and reducing administrative overhead by eliminating the need for separate platform-specific passwords.

What Score 3 Means

The feature offers robust, out-of-the-box support for major protocols (SAML, OIDC) and pre-built connectors for leading IdPs (Okta, Azure AD). It includes essential workflows like JIT provisioning and basic attribute mapping for role assignment.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability for federated authentication, requiring users to create and manage separate, local credentials specifically for this tool.
1Integration with external identity providers is possible only through custom development against generic authentication APIs or by maintaining a custom proxy service, requiring significant engineering effort and maintenance.
2Native support exists for a standard protocol (typically SAML 2.0) or a specific provider (e.g., Google Auth), but the implementation is rigid, lacks Just-in-Time (JIT) provisioning, and requires manual user creation or role assignment.
3The feature offers robust, out-of-the-box support for major protocols (SAML, OIDC) and pre-built connectors for leading IdPs (Okta, Azure AD). It includes essential workflows like JIT provisioning and basic attribute mapping for role assignment.
4Best-in-class implementation includes SCIM support for full user lifecycle automation (provisioning and deprovisioning), granular role synchronization based on IdP groups, and the ability to support multiple identity providers simultaneously for complex organizations.
Data Masking
Basic2
AppSignal provides native support for data masking via agent-side configuration files where users can define specific parameters to filter, but it lacks a centralized UI-driven management interface and automated PII detection libraries.
View details & rubric context

Data masking automatically obfuscates sensitive information, such as PII or financial details, within application traces and logs to ensure security compliance. This capability protects user privacy while allowing teams to debug and monitor performance without exposing confidential data.

What Score 2 Means

Native support allows for basic regex-based search and replace rules defined in agent configuration files, but lacks centralized management or pre-built templates for common data types.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native mechanism to filter or obfuscate sensitive data, resulting in the storage and display of raw PII or credentials within the dashboard.
1Developers must manually sanitize data within the application code before instrumentation, or build custom middleware to intercept and scrub payloads before they reach the APM server.
2Native support allows for basic regex-based search and replace rules defined in agent configuration files, but lacks centralized management or pre-built templates for common data types.
3A comprehensive, UI-driven masking policy is available out-of-the-box, featuring pre-configured libraries for PII/PCI detection that apply consistently across all agents and backend storage.
4The system utilizes machine learning to automatically detect and redact sensitive data anomalies in real-time with zero configuration, offering reversible masking for authorized personnel and detailed compliance auditing.
PII Protection
Basic2
AppSignal provides native parameter filtering that automatically redacts common sensitive keys and allows for custom key definitions via agent configuration files, but it lacks a centralized UI for managing these rules across the entire stack without manual configuration updates.
View details & rubric context

PII Protection safeguards sensitive user data by detecting and redacting personally identifiable information within application traces, logs, and metrics. This ensures compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR and HIPAA while maintaining necessary visibility into system performance.

What Score 2 Means

Native PII masking is provided for common patterns (like credit cards or emails) via simple toggles, but it lacks customization for proprietary data formats or granular control over specific fields.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to identify, mask, or redact personally identifiable information from collected telemetry data.
1PII redaction is possible but requires writing custom code interceptors or manually configuring complex regex patterns in local agent configuration files for every service.
2Native PII masking is provided for common patterns (like credit cards or emails) via simple toggles, but it lacks customization for proprietary data formats or granular control over specific fields.
3The platform provides a robust, centralized UI for defining custom redaction rules, hashing strategies, and allow-lists that propagate instantly to all agents, ensuring consistent compliance across the stack.
4The solution utilizes machine learning to automatically discover and redact sensitive data patterns without manual rules, offering advanced features like reversible masking for authorized users and detailed compliance audit logs.
GDPR Compliance Tools
Basic2
AppSignal provides native support for IP anonymization and parameter filtering to prevent PII from being stored, but these controls are primarily managed via agent-side configuration rather than advanced UI-driven workflows or automated machine learning detection.
View details & rubric context

GDPR Compliance Tools provide essential mechanisms within the APM platform to detect, mask, and manage personally identifiable information (PII) embedded in monitoring data. These features ensure organizations can adhere to data privacy regulations regarding data residency, retention, and the right to be forgotten without sacrificing observability.

What Score 2 Means

Native support includes basic toggles for masking standard fields like IP addresses and setting global retention policies. However, it lacks granular controls for specific data types or easy workflows for individual data subject requests.

Full Rubric
0The product has no specific features for GDPR compliance, forcing teams to rely entirely on external proxies or pre-processing to scrub data before it reaches the APM.
1Compliance requires manual configuration of agent-side scripts or complex regular expressions to filter PII. Data deletion for specific users involves heavy manual intervention or custom API scripting.
2Native support includes basic toggles for masking standard fields like IP addresses and setting global retention policies. However, it lacks granular controls for specific data types or easy workflows for individual data subject requests.
3Strong, fully-integrated compliance features allow for UI-based configuration of data masking rules, granular retention settings by data type, and streamlined workflows for processing 'Right to be Forgotten' requests.
4A market-leading implementation utilizes machine learning to automatically detect and redact PII across all telemetry data in real-time. It includes comprehensive audit trails, automated compliance reporting, and proactive alerts for potential privacy risks.
Audit Trails
Basic2
AppSignal includes a native audit log within its organization settings that tracks key events like user invitations and configuration changes, but it lacks the deep 'before and after' diffs and advanced compliance reporting required for a higher score.
View details & rubric context

Audit trails provide a chronological record of user activities and configuration changes within the APM platform, ensuring accountability and aiding in security compliance and troubleshooting.

What Score 2 Means

Native audit logging is available but provides only a basic list of events with limited retention, lacking detailed context on specific configuration changes or robust filtering.

Full Rubric
0The product has no built-in capability to log user actions, configuration changes, or access history within the platform.
1Audit data is not available in the UI and requires querying generic APIs or manually parsing raw application logs to reconstruct a history of changes.
2Native audit logging is available but provides only a basic list of events with limited retention, lacking detailed context on specific configuration changes or robust filtering.
3The feature offers comprehensive, searchable logs with extended retention, detailing specific "before and after" configuration diffs and user metadata directly within the administrative interface.
4Best-in-class implementation includes immutable, tamper-evident logging with automated anomaly detection, real-time alerting on sensitive actions, and one-click compliance reporting.
Multi-Tenancy
Advanced3
AppSignal provides robust multi-tenancy through its 'Organizations' and 'Teams' structure, which ensures strict logical isolation of data, independent alert configurations, and granular role-based access controls across different applications.
View details & rubric context

Multi-tenancy enables a single APM deployment to serve multiple distinct teams or customers with strict data isolation and access controls. This architecture ensures that sensitive performance data remains segregated while efficiently sharing underlying infrastructure resources.

What Score 3 Means

The platform provides robust, production-ready multi-tenancy with strict logical isolation of data, configurations, and access rights. It supports tenant-specific quotas, distinct RBAC policies, and independent management of alerts and dashboards.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to logically separate data or users into distinct tenants; all users share a single global view of the monitored environment.
1Isolation is possible only through manual workarounds, such as enforcing rigid naming conventions, complex tagging schemes, or deploying separate standalone instances for each group, resulting in high operational overhead.
2Native multi-tenancy exists, allowing for basic logical separation of data into groups or spaces. However, configuration elements like alerts or dashboards may be shared globally, and granular administrative controls per tenant are lacking.
3The platform provides robust, production-ready multi-tenancy with strict logical isolation of data, configurations, and access rights. It supports tenant-specific quotas, distinct RBAC policies, and independent management of alerts and dashboards.
4The solution offers best-in-class multi-tenancy with hierarchical structures, self-service provisioning, and automated usage metering. It enables advanced workflows like cross-tenant aggregation for admins and precise chargeback models for resource consumption.

Ecosystem Integrations

Connects with third-party tools and open standards to unify observability data.

Avg Score
1.6/ 4
Cloud Integration
DIY1
AppSignal focuses primarily on application-level monitoring and host metrics via its own agent, lacking native, API-driven integrations to ingest broader infrastructure data directly from cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or GCP.
View details & rubric context

Cloud integration enables the APM platform to seamlessly ingest metrics, logs, and traces from public cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP. This capability is essential for correlating application performance with the health of underlying infrastructure in hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

What Score 1 Means

Integration with cloud platforms requires building custom scripts or using generic API collectors to fetch and forward metrics, forcing users to maintain their own data ingestion pipelines.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to connect with public cloud providers or ingest infrastructure metrics from AWS, Azure, or GCP.
1Integration with cloud platforms requires building custom scripts or using generic API collectors to fetch and forward metrics, forcing users to maintain their own data ingestion pipelines.
2Native integrations exist for major cloud providers, but coverage is limited to core services like compute and storage with manual configuration required for each resource.
3The platform offers comprehensive, out-of-the-box integrations for a wide range of cloud services across AWS, Azure, and GCP, automatically populating dashboards and correlating infrastructure metrics with application traces.
4The solution features auto-discovery that instantly detects and monitors ephemeral cloud resources as they spin up, providing intelligent cross-cloud correlation that links infrastructure changes directly to user experience impact.
OpenTelemetry Support
Advanced3
AppSignal provides native, production-ready support for OpenTelemetry by allowing users to ingest traces and metrics via OTLP, which are then automatically mapped to its standard dashboards and performance monitoring features.
View details & rubric context

OpenTelemetry support enables the collection and export of telemetry data—metrics, logs, and traces—in a vendor-neutral format, allowing teams to instrument applications once and route data to any backend. This capability is critical for preventing vendor lock-in and standardizing observability practices across diverse technology stacks.

What Score 3 Means

The platform provides robust, production-ready ingestion for OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs, automatically mapping semantic conventions to internal data models for immediate, high-fidelity visibility.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to ingest OpenTelemetry data, requiring the exclusive use of proprietary agents or SDKs for all instrumentation.
1Ingestion is possible only through complex workarounds, such as running a custom OpenTelemetry Collector configuration to translate data into a proprietary format or utilizing generic API endpoints that require significant data mapping.
2Native endpoints exist for OpenTelemetry, but support is partial (e.g., traces only) or results in second-class data handling where OTel data is harder to query and visualize than data from proprietary agents.
3The platform provides robust, production-ready ingestion for OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs, automatically mapping semantic conventions to internal data models for immediate, high-fidelity visibility.
4The solution acts as a comprehensive OpenTelemetry management plane, offering advanced features like remote configuration of collectors, dynamic sampling policies, and automated curation of OTel data for superior observability without configuration overhead.
OpenTracing Support
Not Supported0
AppSignal does not provide native support for the OpenTracing API, relying instead on its proprietary agents and focusing its standards-based interoperability efforts on the newer OpenTelemetry framework.
View details & rubric context

OpenTracing Support allows the APM platform to ingest and visualize distributed traces from the vendor-neutral OpenTracing API, enabling teams to instrument code once without vendor lock-in. This capability is essential for maintaining visibility across heterogeneous microservices architectures where proprietary agents may not be feasible.

What Score 0 Means

The product has no native support for the OpenTracing standard and relies exclusively on proprietary agents or incompatible formats for trace data.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native support for the OpenTracing standard and relies exclusively on proprietary agents or incompatible formats for trace data.
1Users can ingest OpenTracing data only by building custom collectors, writing translation scripts, or using third-party proxies to convert spans into the vendor's proprietary API format.
2The tool natively accepts OpenTracing spans, but the visualization is basic, often restricted to simple waterfalls without service mapping, advanced filtering, or correlation with logs.
3The platform provides robust, out-of-the-box support for OpenTracing, fully integrating traces into service maps, error tracking, and performance dashboards with zero translation friction.
4The solution delivers best-in-class interoperability, automatically bridging OpenTracing data with modern OpenTelemetry contexts and applying advanced AI analytics to detect anomalies within the distributed traces.
Prometheus Integration
Basic2
AppSignal provides a native integration to scrape Prometheus endpoints via its agent, but it lacks native PromQL support, instead mapping the ingested metrics into its proprietary dashboarding and alerting system.
View details & rubric context

Prometheus integration allows the APM platform to ingest, visualize, and alert on metrics collected by the open-source Prometheus monitoring system, unifying cloud-native observability data in a single view.

What Score 2 Means

The platform offers a basic connector or agent to scrape Prometheus endpoints, but visualization is limited to raw counters without PromQL support or pre-built dashboards, often requiring manual mapping of metrics.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to ingest or display metrics from Prometheus, requiring users to rely entirely on separate tools for these data streams.
1Integration is possible only by building custom scripts to convert Prometheus metrics into the APM's proprietary format via generic APIs, resulting in high maintenance overhead and potential data latency.
2The platform offers a basic connector or agent to scrape Prometheus endpoints, but visualization is limited to raw counters without PromQL support or pre-built dashboards, often requiring manual mapping of metrics.
3The solution provides seamless ingestion of Prometheus metrics with full support for PromQL queries within the native UI, including out-of-the-box dashboards for common exporters and automatic correlation with traces.
4The integration features managed Prometheus storage with high cardinality handling and long-term retention, automatically detecting scraping targets and using AI to identify anomalies in Prometheus metrics without manual rule configuration.
Grafana Integration
Basic2
AppSignal provides an official Grafana data source plugin for exporting metrics, but the integration is primarily limited to time-series data and lacks native support for visualizing logs or traces within Grafana, nor does it offer an extensive library of pre-configured dashboard templates.
View details & rubric context

Grafana Integration enables the seamless export and visualization of APM metrics within Grafana dashboards, allowing engineering teams to unify observability data and customize reporting alongside other infrastructure sources.

What Score 2 Means

A basic data source plugin is provided, but it supports only a limited subset of metrics or aggregations, lacks support for logs or traces, and offers no pre-built dashboard templates.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to send metrics or logs to Grafana, nor does it offer a compatible data source plugin for visualization.
1Integration requires building custom middleware to query the APM's generic APIs and transform data into a format Grafana can ingest (e.g., Prometheus exposition format), resulting in high maintenance overhead.
2A basic data source plugin is provided, but it supports only a limited subset of metrics or aggregations, lacks support for logs or traces, and offers no pre-built dashboard templates.
3The solution offers a fully supported, official Grafana data source plugin that handles complex queries, supports metrics, logs, and traces, and includes a library of pre-configured dashboard templates for immediate value.
4The integration features deep, bi-directional linking between the APM UI and Grafana, supports automated dashboard generation based on detected services, and allows for seamless context switching without losing filter parameters or time ranges.

CI/CD & Deployment

Correlates performance changes with code releases to ensure deployment stability.

Avg Score
2.7/ 4
CI/CD Integration
Advanced3
AppSignal provides robust deployment tracking with native integrations for GitHub Actions, Capistrano, and Heroku, automatically enriching performance graphs with commit metadata and direct links to code diffs for rapid triage.
View details & rubric context

CI/CD integration connects the APM platform with deployment pipelines to correlate code releases with performance impacts, enabling teams to pinpoint the root cause of regressions immediately. This capability is essential for maintaining stability in high-velocity engineering environments.

What Score 3 Means

The platform offers deep, out-of-the-box integrations with a wide ecosystem of CI/CD tools, automatically enriching metrics with build details, commit messages, and direct links to the source code for rapid triage.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to track deployments or integrate with CI/CD pipelines, making it impossible to visualize when code changes occurred relative to performance metrics.
1Users can achieve integration by manually triggering generic APIs or webhooks from their build scripts, but this requires custom coding and ongoing maintenance to ensure deployment markers appear.
2Basic plugins are available for popular tools like Jenkins or GitHub Actions to place simple vertical markers on time-series charts, but they lack detailed metadata like commit hashes or diff links.
3The platform offers deep, out-of-the-box integrations with a wide ecosystem of CI/CD tools, automatically enriching metrics with build details, commit messages, and direct links to the source code for rapid triage.
4The integration is bi-directional and intelligent, allowing the APM tool to act as a quality gate that automatically halts or rolls back deployments if performance baselines are violated immediately after release.
Jenkins Plugin
DIY1
AppSignal does not provide a native Jenkins plugin; instead, it requires users to manually integrate deployment tracking by adding custom shell scripts or using the AppSignal CLI within Jenkins build steps.
View details & rubric context

A Jenkins plugin integrates CI/CD workflows with the monitoring platform, allowing teams to correlate performance changes directly with specific deployments. This visibility is crucial for identifying the root cause of regressions immediately after code is pushed to production.

What Score 1 Means

Integration is possible only by writing custom scripts to send data to the APM's API during build steps. Users must manually maintain the connection and define data formatting.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native Jenkins plugin or pre-built integration for tracking CI/CD pipeline activity.
1Integration is possible only by writing custom scripts to send data to the APM's API during build steps. Users must manually maintain the connection and define data formatting.
2A native plugin is available that sends basic deployment markers to the APM timeline. It indicates that a deployment occurred but provides limited context regarding the build version or commit details.
3The plugin is robust, automatically capturing rich metadata such as commit hashes, build numbers, and environment tags. It seamlessly overlays deployment events on performance charts for immediate correlation without manual configuration.
4The integration features intelligent quality gates that can automatically halt or rollback Jenkins pipelines if APM metrics deviate from baselines. It offers deep, bi-directional linking and granular analysis of how specific code changes impacted performance.
Deployment Markers
Best4
AppSignal provides a dedicated deployments dashboard that automatically compares performance metrics before and after a release, links directly to source code diffs, and highlights new errors introduced in specific versions.
View details & rubric context

Deployment markers visualize code releases directly on performance charts, allowing engineering teams to instantly correlate changes in application health, latency, or error rates with specific software updates.

What Score 4 Means

Best-in-class implementation that not only marks deployments but automatically compares pre- and post-deployment performance metrics. It links directly to source code diffs and proactively alerts on regressions caused specifically by the new release.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to track or visualize deployment events on monitoring dashboards.
1Deployment tracking is possible but requires sending custom events via generic APIs or webhooks. Users must build their own scripts to overlay these events on dashboards, often resulting in disjointed or purely log-based visualization.
2Native support for deployment markers exists, but functionality is minimal. Markers appear as simple vertical lines on charts with limited metadata (e.g., timestamp and label only) and lack deep integration with CI/CD workflows.
3Robust deployment tracking is integrated via out-of-the-box plugins for major CI/CD tools. Markers appear automatically on relevant service charts, containing rich details like version, git revision, and user, making correlation intuitive.
4Best-in-class implementation that not only marks deployments but automatically compares pre- and post-deployment performance metrics. It links directly to source code diffs and proactively alerts on regressions caused specifically by the new release.
Version Comparison
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a dedicated Deployments feature that automatically tracks new releases and offers a side-by-side comparison of performance and error metrics against previous baselines, though it lacks advanced statistical regression analysis found in market-leading tools.
View details & rubric context

Version comparison enables engineering teams to analyze performance metrics across different application releases side-by-side to identify regressions. This capability is essential for validating the stability of new deployments and facilitating safe rollbacks.

What Score 3 Means

The platform offers a dedicated release monitoring view that automatically detects new versions and presents a side-by-side comparison of key health metrics against the previous baseline.

Full Rubric
0The product has no capability to distinguish or compare performance data based on application versions or release tags.
1Comparison requires users to manually instrument version tags and build custom dashboards or queries to view metrics from different releases side-by-side.
2Native support allows filtering data by version tags, but comparisons rely on basic chart overlays without dedicated workflows for analyzing differences between releases.
3The platform offers a dedicated release monitoring view that automatically detects new versions and presents a side-by-side comparison of key health metrics against the previous baseline.
4Best-in-class implementation features automated regression detection using statistical significance (e.g., canary analysis) and correlates performance changes directly to specific code commits or config updates.
Regression Detection
Advanced3
AppSignal provides a dedicated Deployments dashboard that automatically compares performance metrics and error rates between the current and previous releases, integrating directly with CI/CD tools. While it effectively highlights regressions and new errors introduced by specific deploys, it lacks the automated rollback triggers and advanced ML-driven anomaly attribution required for a score of 4.
View details & rubric context

Regression detection automatically identifies performance degradation or error rate increases introduced by new code deployments or configuration changes. This capability allows engineering teams to correlate specific releases with stability issues, ensuring rapid remediation or rollback before users are significantly impacted.

What Score 3 Means

The platform provides dedicated release monitoring views that automatically compare key metrics (latency, error rates) of the new version against the previous baseline. It integrates directly with CI/CD tools to tag releases and highlights significant deviations without manual configuration.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to track deployments or automatically compare performance metrics against previous baselines to identify regressions.
1Users can achieve regression detection only by manually exporting data via APIs or building custom dashboards that overlay deployment markers. Analysis requires manual visual comparison or external scripting to calculate deviations.
2Native support includes basic deployment markers on time-series charts, allowing for visual correlation. Users must manually set static thresholds to detect shifts, lacking automated comparison logic or statistical significance testing.
3The platform provides dedicated release monitoring views that automatically compare key metrics (latency, error rates) of the new version against the previous baseline. It integrates directly with CI/CD tools to tag releases and highlights significant deviations without manual configuration.
4The solution utilizes machine learning to detect subtle regressions and anomalies immediately after deployment, automatically attributing them to specific code commits or configuration changes. It offers "set-and-forget" guardrails that can trigger automated rollbacks within the CI/CD pipeline if quality standards are not met.
Configuration Tracking
Basic2
AppSignal supports native deployment markers that allow users to see when a new version was released on performance graphs, but it does not capture specific configuration deltas or detailed file-level changes.
View details & rubric context

Configuration tracking monitors changes to application settings, infrastructure, and deployment manifests to correlate modifications with performance anomalies. This capability is crucial for rapid root cause analysis, as configuration errors are a frequent source of service disruptions.

What Score 2 Means

The tool supports basic deployment markers or version annotations on charts. While it indicates that a release or change event occurred, it does not capture specific configuration deltas or detailed file changes.

Full Rubric
0The product has no native capability to track, store, or visualize configuration changes within the monitoring environment.
1Users must manually instrument custom events via APIs or configure complex log parsing rules to capture configuration changes. There is no native correlation with performance metrics without significant manual setup.
2The tool supports basic deployment markers or version annotations on charts. While it indicates that a release or change event occurred, it does not capture specific configuration deltas or detailed file changes.
3The platform automatically captures and stores detailed configuration snapshots and diffs. Changes are natively overlaid on metric graphs, allowing users to instantly correlate specific setting modifications with performance issues.
4The system provides intelligent, automated correlation of configuration changes from deep within CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure-as-code tools. It automatically highlights specific configuration drifts as the likely root cause of incidents and may suggest remediation steps.

Pricing & Compliance

Free Options / Trial

Whether the product offers free access, trials, or open-source versions

Freemium
Yes
AppSignal offers a permanent free plan that includes 50,000 requests per month, 1GB of logging, and 5-day data retention.
View description

A free tier with limited features or usage is available indefinitely.

Free Trial
Yes
A 30-day free trial is available with access to all features and no credit card required.
View description

A time-limited free trial of the full or partial product is available.

Open Source
No
The core APM platform is proprietary SaaS, although the client integration agents (e.g., for Ruby, Elixir, Node.js) are available as open source on GitHub.
View description

The core product or a significant version is available as open-source software.

Paid Only
No
The product is not paid-only as it offers both a 30-day free trial and a permanent free tier for low-volume usage.
View description

No free tier or trial is available; payment is required for any access.

Pricing Transparency

Whether the product's pricing information is publicly available and visible on the website

Public Pricing
Yes
AppSignal clearly lists its pricing on the website, with plans starting at $23 per month for 250,000 requests. It uses a transparent request-based model and explicitly lists prices for add-ons like Enterprise SAML SSO (€449/month) and HIPAA compliance (€89/month).
View description

Base pricing is clearly listed on the website for most or all tiers.

Hybrid
No
AppSignal does not hide its higher-tier or enterprise pricing behind a 'Contact Sales' wall; instead, it publicly lists the costs for enterprise-grade features like SSO and HIPAA compliance as add-ons.
View description

Some tiers have public pricing, while higher tiers require contacting sales.

Contact Sales / Quote Only
No
Pricing is publicly available on the website, including specific costs for base plans and add-ons, without requiring a quote.
View description

No pricing is listed publicly; you must contact sales to get a custom quote.

Pricing Model

The primary billing structure and metrics used by the product

Per User / Per Seat
No
AppSignal explicitly offers unlimited users on all plans, including the free tier, rather than charging per seat.
View description

Price scales based on the number of individual users or seat licenses.

Flat Rate
No
The pricing is not a fixed flat rate regardless of usage; it scales based on the number of requests (e.g., starting at $23/month for 250k requests).
View description

A single fixed price for the entire product or specific tiers, regardless of usage.

Usage-Based
Yes
AppSignal utilizes a request-based pricing model where costs scale according to the volume of requests and log data processed.
View description

Price scales based on consumption metrics (e.g., API calls, data volume, storage).

Feature-Based
No
AppSignal markets a 'no feature walls' approach, making all core monitoring features available on all plans (including the free tier) rather than gating them behind higher tiers.
View description

Different tiers unlock specific sets of features or capabilities.

Outcome-Based
No
Pricing is determined by usage metrics (requests and logs) rather than the value or business outcomes derived by the customer.
View description

Price changes based on the value or impact of the product to the customer.

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