Overview

groundcover’s eBPF sensor captures and processes telemetry at the edge, with real-time ingestion and no sampling. That approach, combined with metrics, logs and traces in one platform, makes it a strong fit for teams seeking broad production visibility without adding instrumentation to applications. Distributed and transaction tracing, dependency mapping, real user monitoring and log correlation extend that coverage.

Deployment flexibility is a notable strength: Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) puts the backend in the customer’s cloud while groundcover manages it, with the interface hosted by groundcover. Fully On-Prem places both backend and UI on customer premises, including cloud or physical servers. The trade-off is that billing is per monitored host rather than tied to telemetry volume, so costs track average monthly Kubernetes nodes or Linux hosts—not how much data they generate.

Key features

eBPF telemetry: Collects metrics, logs and traces without manual instrumentation or code changes. Edge processing and unsampled, real-time ingestion are useful for teams that want consistent production telemetry.
Integrations: Supports Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Azure, MongoDB Atlas, Redis Cloud, Datadog and GitHub, helping connect monitoring to an existing stack.
Agent Mode: Can investigate telemetry and create dashboards, monitors, gcQL queries and OTTL pipelines. It runs on Amazon Bedrock, OpenAI ChatGPT or Anthropic Claude inside the customer’s cloud; prompts, logs and traces stay within that infrastructure.
Security and compliance: The Trust Center covers CCPA, GDPR, HIPAA, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type 2 and PCI DSS, and provides access to security documents.
Support: Standard support is available during business hours, with response targets ranging from under 8 hours for critical issues to under 72 hours for low-priority issues.

Pricing

groundcover uses freemium pricing, with paid plans starting at $30/mo. Paid billing is per host, per month, based on average monitored Kubernetes nodes or Linux hosts rather than telemetry ingestion. That can suit teams whose host count is a more useful cost measure than data volume, but makes host growth central to budgeting.

Free — 0.00 USD per free, billed Free forever: Includes BYOC, 12 hour data retention, Slack Community support and no credit card requirement. It is a practical way to try the platform, but 12 hours of retention limits its usefulness for investigating issues that surface later, and community support is not the standard business-hours service.
Pro — 30.00 USD per month, billed Per host, per month: Adds all available integrations and data sources, SSO support, standard data retention and standard support, with BYOC. It fits teams moving beyond the free plan’s retention and support limits; per-host billing means the total depends on monitored host count.
Enterprise — 35.00 USD per month, billed Per host, per month: Includes everything in Pro, plus RBAC, unlimited data retention and premium support, with BYOC. The extra cost over Pro is most relevant to teams that need role-based access, longer history or premium support.
On Premise — 50.00 USD per month, billed Per host, per month: Includes everything in Enterprise, plus a self-hosted data plane and UI, isolated authentication and Full On-Prem deployment. It is the fit for organizations that need both product components on their own premises, at the highest per-host price.

Platforms

groundcover supports Linux, self-hosted and web environments. Its hybrid deployment model accommodates a managed interface with a customer-cloud backend through BYOC, or a fully on-premises setup with both backend and UI self-hosted.

Who it's for

Choose groundcover if you need production observability across Kubernetes or Linux hosts, want metrics, logs and traces without manual instrumentation, and value a choice between BYOC and fully on-premises deployment. It is less compelling if a 12-hour free retention window is too short for evaluation or ongoing use, or if per-host billing does not fit how you want monitoring costs to scale.

Pros and cons

Pro: One eBPF sensor collects metrics, logs and traces without code changes, reducing the need for manual instrumentation.
Pro: BYOC and Fully On-Prem provide distinct options for where the backend and interface run.
Pro: Agent Mode can produce several useful observability assets while keeping prompts and telemetry inside the customer’s cloud.
Con: Free retention lasts only 12 hours, limiting the history available for delayed investigations.
Con: Paid costs scale per monitored host, which may be a poor fit when telemetry volume rather than host count is the preferred basis for budgeting.

Alternatives

For a wider comparison, browse Observability Platforms, eBPF Observability Tools, Kubernetes Monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring, Container Monitoring and Metrics Monitoring Tools.

Middleware is worth considering if its free tier’s stated allowances—up to 100GB data, 1k RUM sessions and 20k synthetic checks—better match your evaluation needs.
KloudMate may suit teams looking for a free plan with up to 10 GB/month each of logs and traces, 15M metric samples/month and 7-day retention.
SigNoz is an option for teams that prefer a self-hosted community edition and are prepared to manage infrastructure, storage, scaling, upgrades and backups.
Uptrace may fit teams whose budget is better matched to a cloud allowance of 50 GB free per month, then $0.075/GB, with unlimited users, services and hosts.
Elastic Observability
OpenSearch
Coralogix APM
Sumo Logic

Verdict

groundcover is a strong choice for production teams that want broad eBPF-based telemetry and flexibility over where observability infrastructure runs. Its main reasons to choose it are instrumentation-free collection and BYOC or fully on-premises deployment; look elsewhere if the free plan’s short retention is inadequate or per-host paid billing is a poor fit.

	groundcover	Pixie
Free plan	Yes	Yes
Free trial	Yes	No
Paid from	$30/mo	Free
Open source	No	No
Platforms	Linux, self-hosted, Web	Linux, self-hosted, Web
Free plan	Yes	—
Paid from	30 /mo	—
Distributed tracing	Yes	—

groundcover vs Pixie

groundcover

Pixie