VOL. I · ISSUE 21WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3, 2026
THE

AI Picks

a research journal from Whaily
AI PICKS

Observability and APM: AI Picks

1 niches10 tools tracked2 live prompts

Observability platforms collect logs, metrics, and traces across an application stack and turn them into something an on-call engineer can act on. The interesting buying decisions sit at the boundaries: how much cardinality the pricing model tolerates, how cleanly the agent ships from a Kubernetes cluster, and whether the incident workflow leaves the platform or stays inside it. AI tooling here has shifted fast in the last year.

The top tools, across every angle

Aggregated AI mentions across our 1 niche page in this category. Tools at the top show up no matter which buyer angle a model is asked to consider.

  1. 1

    Datadog

    13 mentions
  2. 2

    New Relic

    11 mentions
  3. 3

    Prometheus

    10 mentions
  4. 4

    Grafana

    8 mentions
  5. 5

    Dynatrace

    5 mentions
  6. 6

    Splunk

    4 mentions
  7. 7

    Elastic Stack

    3 mentions
  8. 8

    Grafana Cloud

    2 mentions
  9. 9

    Coroot

    2 mentions
  10. 10

    Honeycomb

    1 mention

Segments inside observability and apm

Each card opens a deeper page with the full leaderboard, per-model picks, and buyer FAQ for that segment.

What AI is saying right now

We track many prompts on this category for our customers. Below is a sample of the most recently run tracked prompts for observability and apm, with what each AI model surfaced. The full set is much wider than this taste.

  • "Best observability platform for a Kubernetes-heavy production environment?"

    31 May 2026
    • Gemini 2.5 FlashDatadog
    • GPT-4o miniDatadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Splunk
    • Perplexity SonarDatadog, Grafana Cloud, Dynatrace, New Relic, Prometheus
    • Claude Haiku 4.5Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Dynatrace

  • "What is the best observability or APM platform in 2026?"

    31 May 2026
    • Gemini 2.5 FlashDatadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Splunk, Elastic
    • GPT-4o miniDatadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Splunk
    • Perplexity SonarDatadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Grafana Cloud, Honeycomb
    • Claude Haiku 4.5Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Elastic, Grafana

How brands have moved

Weekly ranking of the top 5 brands across our tracked prompts in this category, last 90 days. Lower is better. Hover a point for the raw mention count behind the rank.

What buyers care about in observability and apm

  1. Predictable cost as cluster count and data volume grow

  2. Native Kubernetes integration with cluster, node, pod, and container telemetry

  3. Unified metrics, logs, traces, and events in a single query surface

  4. OpenTelemetry support so instrumentation is portable across vendors

  5. eBPF-based auto-instrumentation that needs no code changes

  6. AI-assisted root cause analysis and anomaly detection

  7. Self-hosted or open source path to avoid vendor lock-in

Sources AI cites in observability and apm

Methodology: how we source and measure.