Skylight vs TraceView: What are the differences?

What is Skylight? The smart profiler for your Rails apps. Skylight is a smart profiler for your Rails apps that visualizes request performance across all of your servers.

What is TraceView? Ridiculously Detailed Application Monitoring. Expose everything, from the webserver to database, cache and API calls. The core technology is based on X-Trace, a distributed tracing framework that’s served as the inspiration for companies like Google and Twitter.

Skylight and TraceView can be primarily classified as "Performance Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by Skylight are:

• Skylight looks at how your code is behaving in production, alerting you to improvements you can make before they become showstoppers.
• Skylight tells you exactly how your app is spending its time where it matters most—in your production environment
• Pricing starts at $20 for the first million requests, with automatic discounts for high-volume customers

On the other hand, TraceView provides the following key features:

• Track every machine involved in a transaction and identify bottlenecks in a single click.
• Isolate interesting calls and drill down to the line of code and machine it ran on.
• Tie together code and infrastructure metrics with database, service, and cache calls, all in the context of a single transaction.

"Beautiful UI" is the top reason why over 10 developers like Skylight, while over 2 developers mention "The heatmap helped me isolate DB related issues" as the leading cause for choosing TraceView.