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Grafana vs Splunk Observability Cloud 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 Observability Cloud
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (9th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th), Container Management (8th)
 

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 Observability Cloud is 1.1%, up from 0.5% 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.
Lakshmi Padaga - PeerSpot reviewer
Collaborates performance metrics with log data to pinpoint the exact cause of issues and offers error detection
Splunk APM is a robust tool with many capabilities. There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience. For Splunk APM, there could be simplified navigation, like streamlining the user interface to make navigation more intuitive for our users, especially those new to APM, which can enhance usability. We can provide more customization options for dashboards and visualizations to help users tailor the platform to their specific needs. There could be more integration capabilities with a wider range of third-party tools and platforms would also be beneficial. By focusing on these areas, Splunk APM can enhance its value proposition, improve user satisfaction, and better meet the evolving needs of organizations monitoring their application performance.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Kubernetes could help us to better visualize the trend of our data by recording and displaying our history over a chosen duration, such as the last 30 days."
"​Grafana has improved our analysis capability to solve an issue, increasing the co-working between IT services and business services.​"
"It has good stability."
"It integrates well with other solutions."
"The solution can scale well."
"It provides a graphical representation and it's clear to see what's happening."
"The dashboards are very easy to work with."
"It is a stable, reliable product."
"The most valuable thing that we have seen within our group is the ability to ingest all this raw data and have it organized in a certain way so that different groups can get effective alerting from this massive amount of raw data that is out there."
"The most beneficial aspect of Splunk APM is the ATM, which is the map displaying the inbound and outbound relationships of the microservices, as well as the traffic between these dependencies. This feature provides us with valuable insights and helps us understand the interactions between different microservices."
"The tool's stability is great."
"Splunk APM has helped us to standardize logging and monitoring procedures."
"Detectors are a powerful feature."
"The most valuable features are troubleshooting and optimizing application performance."
"We haven't really experienced any glitches or bugs."
"The solution's service map feature allows us to have a holistic overview and to see quickly where the issues are."
 

Cons

"If there was an issue on one node, we couldn't drill down and see all the issues on other nodes."
"There are some areas of network drives that are not showing as expected based on server usage."
"The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"They should improve the functioning of its editing tool."
"All the features are complicated."
"Grafana doesn't provide anything for reporting."
"More dashboard is required, out-of-the-box, for OpenNMS."
"It's a bit difficult to use. It takes some time to get into it and to get it to do what you would like it to do. It is not straightforward to use it."
"A wide variety of logging makes log onboarding difficult."
"The end-to-end visibility is lacking because Splunk cannot directly monitor network devices."
"The price has room for improvement."
"In Splunk Observability Cloud, I notice room for improvement in synthetic monitoring. It does not provide output based on server names."
"Splunk APM's performance could be improved - at the moment, it's very slow and takes forever to give me what I want."
"There is not a lot of support for the tool's on-premises version, especially since everything is on the cloud."
"The monitoring of workloads when using SignalFx could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"The solution is expensive."
"We are using the open-source license."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"The price of Splunk APM is less than some of its competitors."
"It is expensive."
"Splunk has been fairly expensive, but it has been predictable."
"Splunk APM is a very cost-efficient solution."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is an expensive solution."
"Splunk Observability Cloud is expensive."
"Splunk's infrastructure monitoring costs can be high because our billing is based on data volume measured in terabytes, rather than the number of devices being monitored."
"I would rate the price of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring as an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
8%
Government
7%
 

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 ...
What do you like most about SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available. We sometimes encountered issues in setting up alerts. The custom detector could be m...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The main purpose of using Splunk APM is to optimize our application. We use Splunk APM primarily to understand how the application works, how it uses resources, and its response time in connection ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring
 

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.
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana vs. Splunk Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.