Observability / Logging / Tracing
Keep and Retina both show up under the observability category, but they solve slightly different jobs. Keep carries low lock-in, while Retina sits at high lock-in. Keep fits teams working on aggregate and deduplicate alerts from 50+ tools, while Retina is a closer match when the job is eBPF-based network traffic visualization for Kubernetes. Worth noting: Keep is explicitly not for teams needing battle-tested AIOps with dedicated 24/7 support; Retina is explicitly not for teams already running Cilium with Hubble or needing polished commercial support. The honest trade-off: Keep trades off on early project, features still stabilizing; Retina trades off on still early vs Cilium Hubble maturity. On the plus side, Keep highlights open-source AIOps with 50+ tool integrations, while Retina points to open-source from Microsoft with active development. Keep's documentation also calls out alert deduplication and correlation in one layer. Retina similarly notes eBPF-based, low overhead on K8s nodes.
Quick take
Keep is for aggregate and deduplicate alerts from 50+; Retina is for eBPF-based network traffic visualization for Kubernetes; decide on lock-in tolerance.
| | | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Observability / Logging / Tracing | Observability / Logging / Tracing |
| Pricing Model | free | free |
| Entry Price | — | — |
| Free Tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing Complexity | — | — |
| Developer Experience | 4/5 | 4/5 |
| Pricing Transparency | 5/5 | 5/5 |
| Lock-in Level | low | high |
| Migration Complexity | — | — |
| Data Portability | — | — |
| Enterprise | — | — |
| GitHub Stars | 11.7k | 3.1k |
| License | NOASSERTION | MIT |
Choose Keep if your project is aggregate and deduplicate alerts from 50+ tools, you want to keep future migration cheap.
Not for: Teams needing battle-tested AIOps with dedicated 24/7 support.
Choose Retina if your project is eBPF-based network traffic visualization for Kubernetes, you are willing to accept the high lock-in called out in our data.
Not for: Teams already running Cilium with Hubble or needing polished commercial support.
Check each tool's dedicated page for deeper reviews, setup notes, and pros/cons.
Keep uses a free model, and Retina uses a free model. Without full pricing pages to compare, we can't rank them on price alone — check each vendor's current rates for your workload.
Our data puts Keep at low lock-in, and Retina at high lock-in (free oss ebpf k8s observability). Migration is feasible but not trivial — budget time for re-integration, data export, and parallel running before cutover.
Both score 4/5 on developer experience in our data, so there's no clear winner on that axis. The better fit depends on which SDK matches your stack and which docs your team finds clearer during evaluation.
Retina is a reasonable alternative to Keep when your workload leans more toward kubernetes network engineers wanting a vendor-neutral eBPF observability tool than platform teams wanting open alternative to PagerDuty AIOps or BigPanda. One caveat: Retina is explicitly not for teams already running Cilium with Hubble or needing polished commercial support, so check that constraint against your use-case before switching.
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