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Grafana vs Splunk AppDynamics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 6, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk AppDynamics
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
246
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th), IT Operations Analytics (2nd), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Grafana is 6.4%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 4.7%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Vikash-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Displays data visually from multiple sources while integrating seamlessly with existing systems
Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for viewing infrastructure metrics through dashboards. It integrates with Prometheus to pull data and offers a straightforward setup process. Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data. Grafana's integration capability is straightforward, which facilitates building dashboards as needed.
Muhammad Zeeshan Siddiqui - PeerSpot reviewer
Dynamic mapping enhances workflows that are user-friendly
One aspect that requires improvement is the agent. Without an agent, gathering sufficient information on applications is challenging. Additionally, the agent sometimes creates performance issues in production environments. If AppDynamics could develop a means to monitor without an agent, it could significantly improve application performance and reduce potential problems. Moving to an agentless solution, like what some competitors are doing, would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"This solution provides valuable insights into the health of our infrastructure in real time."
"Grafana is a very scalable product. It's a really good product."
"Collaboration: Shares data and dashboards across teams."
"Great capacity planning and the solution has a great GUI."
"Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for viewing infrastructure metrics through dashboards."
"The integration between Loki and Tempo is valuable."
"Visualisation: It is easy to create beautiful, understanding graphs, snapshots to share the graphs with people who do not have access to Grafana, and templating to create powerful graphs."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"AppDynamics is easy to implement if you follow the documentation, and the documentation that they provide is good."
"We used AppDynamics to identify gaps and bottlenecks in the software."
"The most valuable feature in AppDynamics is the identifying of the slow responses. Additionally, it is easy to use."
"The product is stable and the technical support is good."
"The monitoring is similar to Dynatrace."
"It gives me the ability to trace logs between transactions, for example, a DB transaction or JVM transaction from one hub to the other. I can easily find out where the problem is or where the bottleneck of the issues lies."
"Technical support is helpful."
"Error analysis in the troubleshooting sections go straight to the point."
 

Cons

"The solution must provide tutorials and guides."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"​The security needs to be improved, such as the capacity to add permissions on dashboards.​"
"Grafana could improve by having its own query language. Currently, it uses languages like Prometheus or InfluxDB, which not everyone knows. Their query language should be easier."
"Setting up alerts via Grafana is a bit complicated, and alerting needs to improve."
"There are not a lot of plugins for financial market monitoring."
"I could not find a user-friendly interface for querying, and analytics sometimes gives the wrong results...I feel that analytics could have been better in searching and running the analytical queries."
"One aspect that requires improvement is the agent. Without an agent, gathering sufficient information on applications is challenging. Additionally, the agent sometimes creates performance issues in production environments."
"Its resiliency can be improved. We're told that the best we can do with an on-prem solution is to have a hot standby that requires a manual switchover. So, it is a do-it-yourself Ikea model of maintaining data consistency between two servers, without having low balance or failover considerations for an on-prem solution."
"This feature needs to be properly described to a client, and then the client needs to have a use case. There are some clients which do not need it and some clients who do. It is not for everyone and is dependant on their use case."
"This product has an issue with initial lag upon opening that we would like to see improved."
"The cost element is an issue. I can't expect the company to change its way of work. However, given the fact that we earn and do all our business in South African Rand, I would prefer to buy in Rand as opposed to the American dollar or British pound."
"AppDynamics is agent-based, so some customers are reluctant to install the agents in all their production environments. It would be helpful if they had an agentless version. It covers applications on the server, but the solution is weak on the network side. The agent is not deployed on the network components, so it cannot provide complete information about issues on the network layer."
"The solution's pricing could be improved and made more competitive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
"The solution is expensive."
"For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"I am using an open-source version"
"We are using the open-source license."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"AppDynamics does not usually do monthly payments. They do it on an annual basis, at the very least."
"The tool is expensive."
"The solution has a high cost."
"It is expensive. However, our time to recover has been reduced, and this product has helped recuperate costs and provided us with ROI."
"There is no standard license instead, the license is adapted to the organization's requirements."
"Because it is priced per JVM, the price can increase pretty fast, into the millions. We have had challenges because we had to justify the price to our clients, as well, when we are putting in certain tools."
"There is a license for the solution and we paid approximately $2,000. There is also an additional cost above the standard license which cost us approximately $3,000."
"The tool is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Educational Organization
47%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Grafana?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
I used the open-source version for my learning, which was free. In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs. I think predictive capabilities in ...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers
Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana vs. Splunk AppDynamics and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.