Best Application Performance Monitoring Software - AI-Verified Rankings

Elastic is the company behind the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, Logstash — the "ELK Stack"), a widely adopted open-source-rooted platform for search, observability, and security. Founded in 2012 by Shay Banon, creator of the original Elasticsearch project, Elastic trades on the NYSE under the ticker ESTC and has one of the largest open-source communities in the observability and search space.

Grafana Labs is the company behind Grafana, the widely adopted open-source visualization and dashboarding tool, along with Grafana Loki (logs), Grafana Tempo (traces), and Grafana Mimir (metrics) — together forming the "LGTM" open-source observability stack. Founded in 2014, Grafana Labs is a privately held, VC-backed company offering Grafana Cloud as a managed service alongside its open-source projects.

Honeycomb (legally Hound Technology, Inc.) is an observability platform built around high-cardinality, high-dimensionality event data rather than pre-aggregated metrics and dashboards. Founded in 2016 by Charity Majors and Christine Yen — former Parse/Facebook engineers who helped popularize the term "observability" in software engineering — Honeycomb lets teams query raw production events in real time via its BubbleUp anomaly-detection feature and a fast query builder, without predefining dashboards. The company is privately held, has raised roughly $150M including a 2023 $50M Series D led by Headline, and is widely used by SRE and platform-engineering teams alongside OpenTelemetry-instrumented services.

Lightstep was founded in 2015 by Ben Sigelman, Ben Cronin and Daniel Spoonhower — engineers who had built Google's internal Dapper distributed-tracing system — to bring large-scale distributed tracing to enterprises. ServiceNow acquired Lightstep in June 2021 and rebranded it ServiceNow Cloud Observability. On August 25, 2025, ServiceNow announced it is sunsetting Cloud Observability, with support ending March 1, 2026 (or a customer's subscription term end, whichever is later); ServiceNow has stated it will not offer a direct native replacement on the Now Platform and instead points customers to a preferred migration partner. This is a real, publicly documented end-of-life event that materially affects the product's current standing.

Sematext is a smaller, full-stack observability company offering log management, infrastructure monitoring, APM, and real user monitoring under one platform (Sematext Cloud). Founded in 2010, Sematext is a privately held, bootstrapped company built on open-source expertise (notably Elasticsearch/Solr), serving small and mid-size engineering teams.