Cisco UCS Manager vs Grafana Enterprise Stack comparison

Cisco and Grafana Labs are both solutions in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category. Cisco is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.8, while Grafana Labs is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.7. Cisco holds a 1.3% mindshare in IM, compared to Grafana Labs’s 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Grafana Labs users who would recommend it.

Cisco UCS Manager

Read 27 Cisco UCS Manager reviews

2,456 Views
2,260 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Grafana Enterprise Stack

Read 14 Grafana Enterprise Stack reviews

1,692 Views
1,675 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Cisco UCS Manager

Grafana Enterprise Stack

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Cisco UCS Manager and Grafana Enterprise Stack compete in the IT management category. Cisco UCS Manager has the upper hand in simplicity and customer support, while Grafana Enterprise Stack is superior in data handling and visualization capabilities.

Features: Cisco UCS Manager provides unified management for compute, network, and storage resources, streamlining operations within data centers. It offers real-time system monitoring and automated resource allocation, enhancing operational efficiency. Grafana Enterprise Stack focuses on data visualization with powerful dashboards, real-time analytics, and extensive integration with data sources, facilitating complex data interpretations.

Room for Improvement: Cisco UCS Manager could improve its interface design to be more user-friendly, enhance third-party integrations, and expand customization options. Grafana Enterprise Stack needs to streamline its deployment process, enhance scalability for larger data sets, and improve support for non-developer users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco UCS Manager is easily deployed within Cisco environments, supported by strong vendor assistance, ensuring a smooth setup experience. Grafana Enterprise Stack provides robust integration with multiple data sources, but its deployment may require significant customization for optimal use, though it does offer comprehensive support services.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco UCS Manager involves higher setup costs due to hardware requirements, yet it offers good ROI through efficient resource management within existing Cisco environments. Grafana Enterprise Stack presents competitive pricing, with substantial value through advanced analytics, offering a high ROI particularly in data-driven operations.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Manager vs. Grafana Enterprise Stack Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Manager vs. Grafana Enterprise Stack

March 2026

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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

Cisco UCS Manager

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

18th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Grafana Enterprise Stack

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

13th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco UCS Manager is 1.3%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Grafana Enterprise Stack	1.1%
Cisco UCS Manager	1.3%
Other	97.6%

IT Infrastructure Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Rob-Croxford

Consultant at rcnss

A market leader with an enhanced user interface for seamless experience

There is room for improvement in terms of cost and complexity to set up. It doesn't work straight out of the UCS, so someone who knows what they're doing is needed immediately, and it can be quite confusing. Some settings are still fairly well hidden, even the basic ones. Companies don't really understand how long it takes to set up. Also, when changes are pushed, it can take their phone line off the system for twenty minutes to half an hour. Out-of-the-box functionality is an issue, too. I know that my company is different, however, the basics are always the same. You do your tap lines, zip lines, and stuff like that, then you get your internal phone line system. That can all be automated and scripted, and it's probably part of the automation process. However, I haven't really seen it.

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Rajan M

Test Lead at Calpine Group

Efficient monitoring and alerting enhance operational insights

With Grafana Enterprise Stack, we can identify issues that New Relic cannot help with. While New Relic requires purchase and supports frontend and backend components, Grafana Enterprise Stack helps identify where issues are occurring. When we need to deep dive into issues, we use New Relic to trace transactions and determine where maximum impact occurs, whether in core size, DB side, or frontend components that slow performance. We first evaluate with Grafana Enterprise Stack, then move to New Relic if we identify performance degradation, such as DB queries taking too much time. Grafana Enterprise Stack responds to queries within 6 to 12 hours. They contact users through email immediately when available. Similarly, New Relic follows the same pattern, responding immediately when requests are raised and resolving issues promptly.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The interface is ergonomic and native. We can use UCS Manager to do all the configurations for the servers, including storage, networking, and all the other components we need inside the fabric. It's simple and flexible."

"The best thing about UCSM and the UCS B-Series servers is its centralization, which means from one location we can configure storage, network and compute for all the servers that will be using it."

"Cisco UCS Manager is overall a good package because it offers a GUI interface and a CLI."

"Ease of management is certainly the most valuable feature in this product."

"Cisco UCS Manager is overall a good package because it gives a GUI interface and a CLI."

"What I like most about Cisco UCS Manager is the ease of administration. It also allows the central management of maintenance, installation, and configuration activities."

"The most valuable features of Cisco UCS Manager include the visibility it provides and the ease of identifying issues within the Cisco environment."

"Cisco UCS Manager is recommended for its ease of deployment and management capabilities."

More Cisco UCS Manager pros

"The dashboards are pretty good."

"It is truly reliable."

"Our productivity has improved with its use."

"It is very easy to deploy and integrate with any application or infrastructure layer."

"The ability to graph actual, live, or on-the-fly activity is valuable; it is an added value to work with Grafana Enterprise Stack and to display results or logs, which are huge in nature, in graphical characters."

"The most valuable features of Grafana for data visualization are its ability to create intuitive dashboards and its wide range of visualization options like graphs, charts, and tables."

"Compared to other packages, Grafana Enterprise Stack is user-friendly and easy to configure quickly."

"The tool's most valuable feature is real-time monitoring. It helps in securing the application or the node by allowing us to monitor and manage resource consumption during peak times. For instance, from 10 AM to 2 PM, we may experience high memory utilization. It helps us to solve these issues."

More Grafana Enterprise Stack pros

Cons

"I found it a bit of a challenge to get training on UCSM. I've been trying to get that for some time now."

"I found it a bit of a challenge to get training on UCSM. I've been trying to get that for some time now. I feel like I have to figure it out a lot of things myself. For years I've to log calls with support whenever I've got challenges that I cannot resolve. If I had some training or more manuals, I'd be better able to handle more things on my own."

"There is room for improvement in terms of cost and complexity to set up. It doesn't work straight out of the UCS, so someone who knows what they're doing is needed immediately, and it can be quite confusing."

"Cisco UCS is expensive compared to others. The Cisco UCS Chassis is more expensive than a standalone server, but some companies require standalone servers because of their production load and affordability. You need to pay more if you require more features on the Blade or if you need more ports on the switch."

"The interface and the way it is constructed is very complex. They should work to simplify it."

"The licensing cost for Cisco UCS Manager is around four out of ten. It is not cost-effective due to its high price, especially regarding memory expansion."

"Cisco UCS Manager is not a scalable solution because once you have 160 blades, it cannot be expanded more."

"The solution's pricing is high and could be reduced."

More Cisco UCS Manager cons

"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved. Currently, one needs to ingest labels and timestamps for them to be connected, however, drilling down sometimes takes time."

"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved."

"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."

"If Grafana Enterprise Stack could display transaction queries in dashboard format similar to New Relic, it would provide more options and capabilities for users."

"I have encountered occasional issues with false inputs or incorrect data in Grafana."

"I find Grafana really hard to configure. It's difficult to build the dashboard, and it's non-intuitive. In my opinion, it's very difficult to work with Grafana."

"Grafana Enterprise Stack is complex and not easy or simple."

"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."

More Grafana Enterprise Stack cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We need to take a license for each port, which amounts to a big sum."

"Cisco UCS Manager’s annual licensing fee is expensive."

"With product discounts which can be negotiated, the product is a great value."

"You buy the hardware and then you get Cisco UCS Manager for free."

"Cisco UCS is more expensive than Dell and HP, but it is more reliable. I see less issues and it's quite stable."

"The pricing for Cisco UCS Manager is okay for its market, so it's a four out of five for me."

"I use the tool's free license."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Government

Energy/Utilities Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	18

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco UCS Manager?

When one server fails, we can attach the service profile to a new server, which saves a lot of time.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco UCS Manager?

My experience with the pricing of Cisco UCS Manager ( /products/cisco-ucs-manager-reviews ) is that it is reasonable. Recently, we acquired an excellent bundle with significant discounts, with offe...

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What needs improvement with Cisco UCS Manager?

For improvements, while the current graphical user interface is satisfactory, it could be further simplified for different tasks. While it has been improved from using Java to HTML, simplifying the...

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What needs improvement with Grafana Enterprise Stack?

I am trying to think about its advanced alerting features; we do not use it too much for that. We do get it to report through to our help desk system and if a threshold gets broken, then a ticket i...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?

I have switched to a different suite, focusing on customer edge solutions that are mostly Fortinet. To manage it, I use Grafana Enterprise Stack and a whole bunch of tools that we wrote ourselves. ...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Grafana Enterprise Stack?

We use Grafana Enterprise Stack in all of our clients. I rate this product an eight out of ten.

See all answers

Comparisons

Cisco Intersight vs Cisco UCS Manager

Compared 57% of the time

Nutanix Prism vs Cisco UCS Manager

Compared 5% of the time

HPE OneView vs Cisco UCS Manager

Compared 4% of the time

Datadog vs Cisco UCS Manager

Compared 3% of the time

SolarWinds NPM vs Cisco UCS Manager

Compared 3% of the time

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NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights vs Grafana Enterprise Stack

Compared 21% of the time

LiveNX vs Grafana Enterprise Stack

Compared 10% of the time

Lenovo XClarity Orchestrator vs Grafana Enterprise Stack

Compared 6% of the time

VMware Aria Operations for Applications vs Grafana Enterprise Stack

Compared 5% of the time

ITRS Geneos vs Grafana Enterprise Stack

Compared 5% of the time

More Grafana Enterprise Stack Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Manager

March 2026

Download Cisco UCS Manager product report

Buyer's Guide

Grafana Enterprise Stack

March 2026

Download Grafana Enterprise Stack product report

Overview

Cisco UCS Manager helps significantly reduce management and administration expenses by automating routine tasks to increase operational agility. Customers can extend the benefits of Cisco UCS Manager globally across an enterprise to thousands of servers in multiple domains with Cisco UCS Central Software.

Cisco

Grafana Enterprise Stack is a powerful tool for real-time data monitoring and visualization. With its flexible and scalable features, it is widely used for creating dashboards, analyzing metrics, and gaining insights into infrastructure, databases, and applications.

Its valuable features include powerful visualization capabilities, extensive data source integrations, customizable dashboards, a user-friendly interface, and a robust alerting system. Users appreciate its flexibility, scalability, and ability to integrate with different data sources, making it suitable for a wide range of industries and use cases.

Grafana Labs

Sample Customers

Management Science Associates, Peak 10, Virtual Consulting Professionals

1. Uber 2. PayPal 3. eBay 4. Sony 5. Red Hat 6. IBM 7. Cisco 8. Adobe 9. Expedia 10. Booking.com 11. Airbnb 12. LinkedIn 13. Twitter 14. Netflix 15. Spotify 16. Pinterest 17. Slack 18. GitLab 19. Docker 20. Atlassian 21. Salesforce 22. Microsoft 23. Google 24. Amazon 25. Facebook 26. Apple 27. Intel 28. Oracle 29. SAP 30. VMware 31. HP 32. Dell

Buyer's Guide

Cisco UCS Manager vs. Grafana Enterprise Stack

March 2026

Free Report: Cisco UCS Manager vs. Grafana Enterprise Stack

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Manager vs. Grafana Enterprise Stack and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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