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Elastic Observability vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Elastic Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Log Management (14th), Container Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
ServiceNow Cloud Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
41st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 5.1%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is 0.4%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Adelina Craciun - PeerSpot reviewer
Customization enables tailored monitoring and alerting across departments
The possibility to customize it has been quite useful. Whatever the other departments want to dream up, we implement. Whatever they want to monitor, the granularity of it, the changes in the threshold, and the anomalies that they want reported all require some development. So far, every single request has been fulfilled.
VinayKumar16 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides ease of use in areas like analytics and reporting
The feature of the tool that is more impactful for cloud performance stems from the area revolving around analytics and reporting. It is an easy-to-use tool. There is something known as performance analytics within ServiceNow that offers complete analytics, which offers end-to-end analytics along with the KPI metrics with what we have in place and so on. With the aforementioned aspects of the tool, I think we should be able to create a dashboard according to the operations view called the operation dashboard view, specifically for C-level executives.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"All the features that we use, such as monitoring, dashboarding, reporting, the possibility of alerting, and the way we index the data, are important."
"The price is very less expensive compared to the other solutions."
"We use AppDynamics and Elastic. The reason why we're using Elastic APM is because of the license count. It's very favorable compared to AppDynamics. It's inexpensive; it's economical."
"I found Elk to be excellent for log analytics, security analytics, application code-level analytics, collaboration with DevOps teams, CI/CD, microservices, and Kubernetes, specifically cloud-native or cloud-specific tasks."
"I have built a mini business intelligence system based on Elastic Observability."
"It is a powerful tool that allows users to collect and transform logs as needed, enabling flexible visualization and analysis."
"Elastic provides built-in features for queries and report generation. It's a very good tool for monitoring integration capabilities."
"Machine learning is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The UI is very intuitive."
"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."
"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."
"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."
 

Cons

"Elastic Observability could improve asset discovery as the current requirement to push the agent is not ideal."
"Simplifying the parsing of logs and manual efforts would also be beneficial."
"The solution would be better if it was capable of more automation, especially in a monitoring capacity or for the response to abnormalities."
"Elastic APM's visualization is not that great compared to other tools. It's number of metrics is very low."
"Elastic Observability is an excellent product for monitoring and visibility, but it lacks predictive analytics. Most solutions are aligned with the AIOps requirements, but this piece is missing in Elastic and should be included."
"Elastic Observability needs to improve the retrieval of logs and metrics from all the instances."
"The interface could be improved."
"Elastic Observability is reactive rather than proactive. It should act as an ITSM tool and be able to create tickets and alerts on Jira."
"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."
"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."
"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."
"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Users have to pay for some features, like the alerts on different channels, because they are unavailable in different source versions."
"Elastic Observability is cheaper than other similar solutions, such as Dynatrace. Its license calculation is based on various factors like data volume and physical infrastructure, particularly related to RAM capacity."
"So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing to someone that is discussing pricing of the solution."
"We will buy a premium license after POC."
"Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us."
"One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."
"Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing. However, sizing and licensing information could be clearer.
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
Of course, maintenance is necessary, as with any software, requiring updates with the latest features and security enhancements. It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like netw...
What needs improvement with LightStep?
There are a lot of workflows and connectors. In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs.
What is your primary use case for LightStep?
I use the solution in my company since it has multiple tenants available. Basically, what happens in business is that you have a hybrid setup model, and for that, you extensively use a cloud platfo...
 

Also Known As

No data available
LightStep
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Observability vs. ServiceNow Cloud Observability and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,823 professionals have used our research since 2012.