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Azure Monitor vs Grafana comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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

Azure Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (5th)
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
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 7.5%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 6.4%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Syed Abid  - PeerSpot reviewer
Monthly and weekly resource monitoring has improved efficiency
Azure Monitor can improve by adding some kind of storage for logs. I can get the runtime logs alone, yet if Azure Monitor can independently add one gigabyte, two gigabytes, or five gigabytes at least to log storage, I can fix the logs without syncing with Log Analytics Workspace and Sentinel. If they do that, and if they can integrate a little pricing adjustment, it will be profitable for the Microsoft tool.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The features that are most valuable are the alerting function and also the logging functionality to analyze certain issues using log analytics"
"The feature that I found most valuable in Azure Monitor is its monitoring abilities. With Azure Monitor, you are able to monitor all of your cloud resources across multiple subscriptions in one dashboard and create solution-specific alerts that can trigger an email to the team responsible for that specific solution."
"Technical support is good and helpful...The initial setup is easy."
"One of the most useful aspects of this solution is the out-of-the-box functionality on all areas, especially on Application Insights, zero instrumentation, and artificial intelligence for event correlation."
"I find the query language in this tool very beneficial, as it allows me to customize some dashboards and create alerts according to my thresholds and metrics."
"It has good troubleshooting features."
"It allows you to set thresholds on the metrics and receive alerts."
"Good load and metrics gathering and very good analysis."
"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."
"​Grafana has improved our analysis capability to solve an issue, increasing the co-working between IT services and business services.​"
"It excels in providing comprehensive details when there are downtimes or fluctuations, offering thorough reports."
"It has good stability."
"The best feature was the creation of graphs and trends."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"I find Grafana beneficial due to its numerous plugins."
 

Cons

"Azure Monitor could improve the visualization aspect and integrate better with other third-party services."
"It might not have all of the capabilities we will need."
"I need connectivity with cost management."
"It's really complex to retrieve or query the logs in Azure Monitor."
"Azure Monitor's integration with applications could be improved."
"They can simplify the overall complexity since you have multiple data sources in the cloud for monitoring. It's quite simple, but there are so many portals. It takes time to work with it. If they could simplify the user configuration, that would be good."
"In terms of pricing, Azure Monitor's billing based on data size can sometimes lead to increased costs, especially when developers need to purge data frequently. While there are mechanisms in place to track and manage this, there is room for improvement in terms of optimizing data pausing and related processes. Enhancements in this area could help mitigate potential billing concerns and provide a more seamless experience for users."
"In my opinion, they should improve the overall user experience, especially when it comes to indexing and searching collective logs."
"They should improve the functioning of its editing tool."
"Writing queries can be a bit difficult because the syntax must be maintained."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"It's difficult to see the trends on the graph when the range is too long."
"Grafana could consider building its own metrics system to eliminate the reliance on other tools like Prometheus, providing a one-stop solution."
"The look and feel of the charting and graph capabilities in Grafana could improve. If they provided a storyboard type of feature as they have in other solutions, such as PowerBI. The multi-tenanted and stitch metrics features could improve."
"I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on; we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors."
"Lacks event management which affects our DevOps people."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a monthly fee for the alerts triggered and the data stored."
"My company is okay with the current pricing of the solution."
"Its cost depends on the ingestion of the logs. It could go anywhere. For an out-of-the-box platform such as FrameFlow, you pay pretty much a fixed price and you get what you get, whereas, with something like Azure Monitor, you pay by the ingestion charge, so you can have one client who pays hardly anything for the same alerts, and another client pays loads and loads."
"It is a pay-as-you-go model. I find it very cost-effective."
"The Azure Insight is a little bit expensive."
"It's a costly solution"
"Regarding pricing, Azure Monitor is free with Azure license, so there are no additional costs for using it."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"The solution is expensive."
"We are using the open-source license."
"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."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
What do you like most about Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.
What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor can improve by adding some kind of storage for logs. I can get the runtime logs alone, yet if Azure Monitor can independently add one gigabyte, two gigabytes, or five gigabytes at lea...
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 ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group
Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Monitor vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.