Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Apache SkyWalking VS Cortex Project

Compare Apache SkyWalking VS Cortex Project and see what are their differences

Apache SkyWalking logo Apache SkyWalking

Apache SkyWalking is an open-source application performance monitoring solution that provides tracking, metrics analysis, service mesh observability, alarm, and visualization.

Cortex Project logo Cortex Project

Horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant, long term Prometheus.
  • Apache SkyWalking Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-21
  • Cortex Project Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-04

Apache SkyWalking features and specs

  • Comprehensive Observability
    Apache SkyWalking provides end-to-end observability of distributed systems including service, process, and container metrics, as well as logs and events, enabling holistic monitoring and performance optimization.
  • Distributed Tracing
    SkyWalking offers robust distributed tracing capabilities that allow users to trace requests end-to-end across various services and platforms, aiding in root cause analysis and performance monitoring.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source project under the Apache umbrella, SkyWalking benefits from community contributions, regular updates, and improvements, offering transparency and flexibility.
  • Wide Protocol Support
    SkyWalking supports a wide range of protocols and platforms, such as HTTP, gRPC, Dubbo, and supports multiple languages including Java, .NET, Python, and more, making it versatile across different tech stacks.
  • Dashboarding and Visualization
    The platform provides powerful dashboards and visualization tools, allowing users to easily interpret data, create custom dashboards, and derive insights from visual metrics.

Possible disadvantages of Apache SkyWalking

  • Complex Setup
    Setting up and configuring SkyWalking can be complex, especially for organizations unfamiliar with distributed observability tools, potentially requiring significant time and expertise.
  • Scalability Challenges
    While SkyWalking is designed for distributed systems, scaling its deployment for very large environments might present challenges, necessitating careful architectural planning.
  • Resource Intensive
    SkyWalking can be resource-intensive, as it collects a large amount of telemetry data, which might lead to high overhead on system resources like CPU and memory.
  • Learning Curve
    Due to its comprehensive feature set and various configurations, there can be a steep learning curve associated with effectively utilizing SkyWalking, particularly for new users.
  • Limited UI Customization
    The user interface, while functional, offers limited customization options compared to some commercial observability solutions, which might be a limitation for users needing highly tailored dashboards.

Cortex Project features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Apache SkyWalking videos

Chapter04 Session10 - Apache Skywalking by Sheng Wu

More videos:

  • Review - Apache SkyWalking | Top 42 Alternatives of Apache SkyWalking
  • Review - Observability in Service Mesh Powered by Envoy and Apache SkyWalking - Sheng Wu & Lizan Zhou

Cortex Project videos

No Cortex Project videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apache SkyWalking and Cortex Project)
Monitoring Tools
67 67%
33% 33
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0
Databases
0 0%
100% 100
Development
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache SkyWalking should be more popular than Cortex Project. It has been mentiond 18 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Apache SkyWalking mentions (18)

  • I gave up on self-hosted Sentry
    A good APM tool I’ve been using for a few years is Apache Skywalking: https://skywalking.apache.org/ It might not do everything Sentry does but it definitely has helped with tracking down some issues, even production ones and runs in a fairly manageable setup (in comparison to how long even the Sentry self-hosted Docker Compose file is). What’s more, if you want, you can even use regular PostgreSQL as the backing... - Source: Hacker News / 14 days ago
  • OpenTelemetry Tracing in < 200 lines of code
    > I maintain that any platform that isn’t using some sort of tracing system is practically negligent in their engineering duty. For some, it's difficult because many of the self-hostable out there are rather complex and have high requirements, like https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-compose.yml but it's not exactly ideal either. I wonder what other good options are out there, something... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • 14 Monitoring Tools for Full-Stack Developers
    Apache SkyWalking is an open-source APM tool meant for distributed systems. It has support for distributed tracing, agents in multiple languages, and support for an eBPF agent. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Release Radar · May 2024 Edition: Major updates from the open source community
    Are you working on microservices, cloud native, and container-based architectures? Then you need to check out Apache Skywalking. It's an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) system, that provides monitoring, tracing, and diagnosing capabilities for distributed systems in Cloud Native architectures. This latest update has hundreds of changes including support for Java 21 runtime, new functions and parameters,... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Enhancing API Observability Series (Part 3): Tracing
    When choosing distributed tracing tools, considerations include your technology stack, business requirements, and monitoring complexity. Zipkin, SkyWalking, and OpenTelemetry are popular distributed tracing solutions, each with its unique features. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
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Cortex Project mentions (6)

  • Top 10 Prometheus Alternatives in 2024 [Includes Open-Source]
    Cortex is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant prometheus alternative. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Scaling Prometheus with Thanos
    There are many Projects like Thanos, M3, Cortex, and Victoriametrics. But Thanos is the most popular among these. Thanos addresses these issues with Prometheus and is the ideal solution for scaling Prometheus in environments with extensive metrics or multiple clusters where we require a global view of historical metrics. In this blog, we will explore the components of Thanos and will try to simplify its... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Self hosted log paraer
    Now if its more metric data you are using and want to do APM, prometheus is your man https://prometheus.io/, want to make prometheus your full time job? Deploy cortex https://cortexmetrics.io/, honorable mention in the metrics space, Zabbix, https://www.zabbix.com/ I've seen use cases of zabbix going way beyond its intended use its a fantastic tool. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Is anyone frustrated with anything about Prometheus?
    Yes, but also no. The Prometheus ecosystem already has two FOSS time-series databases that are complementary to Prometheus itself. Thanos and Mimir. Not to mention M3db, developed at Uber, and Cortex, then ancestor of Mimir. There's a bunch of others I won't mention as it would take too long. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Centralized solution for Prometheus?
    You can use the Remote write feature to send to a centralized location. It would have to be scalable like Cortex https://cortexmetrics.io/. Source: about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apache SkyWalking and Cortex Project, you can also consider the following products

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Thanos.io - Open source, highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities.

SigNoz - Open source alternative to Datadog

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

VictoriaMetrics - Fast, easy-to-use, and cost-effective time series database