APM dashboards are excellent at showing you what happened and pulling everything into one pane; ValidAnytime is not a dashboard — it is the trustworthy alarm layer that sits alongside one. The gap is the alerting: a fixed line on a metric, checked continuously, is a false-alarm machine.
| Capability | ValidAnytime | Threshold dashboards (Datadog / Grafana-style) |
|---|---|---|
| Valid under continuous monitoring (unlimited peeking) | YesAnytime-valid by construction — Ville's inequality bounds the false-alarm rate at every look at once. | NoFixed thresholds and fixed-n tests inflate false alarms the more often you check. |
| Fleet-wide false-alarm control (online FDR) | YesA false-discovery budget shared across every stream, not per-alert luck. | NoAlerts are configured per-metric; no global bound on false discoveries. |
| Per-alarm statistical certificate | YesEvery alarm ships a guarantee tag and a theorem reference — you can audit why it fired. | NoAn alert tells you a line was crossed, not what its error guarantee is. |
| Prove it on your own history before committing (backtest gate) | YesReplay your past data: a config only ships if it stays quiet on normal history and fires on a real regression. | PartialYou can chart history, but there is no gate that validates a detector's error behaviour before it goes live. |
| Metric dashboards & visualization | PartialFocused reports on what we monitor — not a general-purpose dashboarding product. | YesBest-in-class charts, boards, and drill-downs. |
| Infra / APM / log integrations | PartialStream any numeric metric in; deep infra integrations are on the roadmap. | YesHundreds of first-party integrations across the stack. |
| Anomaly detection on stable noise | YesStays quiet on stable noise however often you look; fires once when evidence is real. | PartialAnomaly monitors exist but are tuned by hand and lack a formal error guarantee. |
We are not trying to be a dashboard, a tracer, or a platform. If you need these, reach for the right tool — often alongside ValidAnytime.
A comparison table is claims; behavior is measurable. The honest drift-detector benchmark replays every detector we ship — including the classical control-chart rules most monitoring stacks alert with — against labeled synthetic breaks, and the detector guides explain each rule, where it wins, and where it lies.
Replay your own history through the backtest gate and see whether — and at which point — ValidAnytime would have caught your regression. Free, in minutes.
Comparison based on public documentation as of July 2026; corrections welcome — email hello@validanytime.com. Source: Threshold dashboards (Datadog / Grafana-style) docs