Prometheus is a CNCF project and is Open Source. It has better integration into the container metrics and can automatically scale up and down the application based on demand. See https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/comparison/ for clear comparison with other Open Source players in the area.
The main Prometheus server runs standalone and has no external dependencies, but for production-grade dashboards, it recommends to use Grafana. See https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/faq/#how-does-prometheus-compare-against-other-monitoring-sy...?
Coming to Kubernetes monitoring from AppD, it's not free and the product is still evolving :-) You need the Server Visibility license for Kubernetes Monitoring to work. For production-grade dashboards and metrics, you don't have to approach third-party tools but you get them all on the AppDynamics Controller. See https://docs.appdynamics.com/display/CLOUD/Kubernetes+and+AppDynamics+APM for more information.
Here are the restrictions on the latest version:
- Only Docker Container Runtime is supported.
- Only APM-monitored application metrics are collected.
- Only pod and ReplicaSet labels are supported, which implies only pods are monitored.
That said, we are actively working towards enhancing the current version.
