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ControlUp vs Grafana Enterprise Stack comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 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

ControlUp
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
19th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (4th)
Grafana Enterprise Stack
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
13th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of ControlUp is 0.9%, up from 0.9% 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 Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Grafana Enterprise Stack1.1%
ControlUp0.9%
Other98.0%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2717526 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Delivers comprehensive and customizable system management with increased efficiency
The best features I have found are that it is very customizable, which would be number one, and very extensible through the use of scripts and triggers. The visual look of the interface is very easy to understand what is happening and somewhat why it's happening. It may sound facetious, but it really is everything about it. Everything works exactly the way it's meant to, a dream come true for anyone who's administering systems because it gives you all the information that you want and all the actions you want to take, all in one place. The benefits I have seen from using it so far include the ability to know in advance and take actions based on the information the tool gives you.
RM
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The script-based actions have allowed us to extend the core reporting capabilities."
"ControlUp is beneficial as it provides a web interface through which you can access all your infrastructure—servers, devices, and VDI infrastructure—all on the same platform. It supports gathering all infrastructure components in a single, unified dashboard. This helps you identify performance issues or high resource utilization, allowing quick troubleshooting. I appreciate the solid interface that ControlUp offers."
"ControlUp has some good functionalities, such as remotely pushing scripts in the device through the tool."
"It has a great career time monitoring tool."
"ControlUp has a lot of automation in it; it detects problems and failures very well, and it's not only monitoring, but it's also detecting, and it could even fix problems with a lot of automation that you can put in place to fix problems automatically before you even detect them."
"It shows you so many details of what's going on in that log-on that, if there's a problem, you can identify it in five minutes."
"ControlUp has an easy installation process."
"When using ControlUp, the core feature that we have found valuable is its UI. It is a valuable tool to view the analysis reactions of a base core Level 2 or Level 1 team so that they can complete the necessary troubleshooting."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."
"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."
"Grafana Enterprise Stack is a powerful open-source platform with robust capabilities in data visualizations, dashboard creations, and alerting."
"Compared to other packages, Grafana Enterprise Stack is user-friendly and easy to configure quickly."
"Grafana's most valuable feature is its ability to provide a graphical representation of data collected from various sources."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"The most valuable features for us are dashboards; we can dashboard anything that we can think of, we can dashboard and measure."
 

Cons

"It can be improved by including script-based scheduling."
"The graphical user interface needs to be improved from version to version."
"Something I would love to see from a partner perspective would be maybe a way to do this in a surface hosting provider."
"The most common complaint that I have heard, at least within our organization, is about reporting. They have their own reporting. It's just that it doesn't yet include everything that you can look at within the application. You can only report on specific metrics or collections."
"Most reports give information about the top 100 devices, but not all of the devices."
"This solution be improved by including load throttling tools. For example, I can identify a service where we spend a lot of CPU but I cannot restrict the service from ControlUp. I have to use another tool like AppSense."
"There is area for improvement, maybe in the reporting. It could use some work in reporting."
"It is expensive. It is very expensive. I was working in a bank, and even in the bank, which was quite healthy, the ControlUp budget was something we had to defend very harshly."
"I have encountered occasional issues with false inputs or incorrect data in Grafana."
"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 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."
"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."
"The tool needs to show only fewer updates."
"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."
"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."
"Grafana Enterprise Stack is complex and not easy or simple."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Based on my experience, ControlUp is not that expensive."
"Personally, I would say that the only thing I could compare it to is another monitoring tool that we use, Nagios."
"We are satisfied with the price compared to other solutions."
"I use the tool's free license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Healthcare Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ControlUp Real-time?
It is expensive. It is very expensive. I was working in a bank, and even in the bank, which was quite healthy, the ControlUp budget was something we had to defend very harshly.
What is your primary use case for ControlUp Real-time?
I was taking care of a Citrix infrastructure, and as ControlUp is the best monitoring tool for those environments, I was also using ControlUp to monitor those environments.
What do you like most about Grafana Enterprise Stack?
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,...
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...
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. ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

B/E Aerospace, North Carolina SECU, Vancouver Island Health Authority, University of Florida
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
Find out what your peers are saying about ControlUp vs. Grafana Enterprise Stack and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
880,685 professionals have used our research since 2012.