Splunk AppDynamics and Grafana are prominent competitors in the field of application performance monitoring and data visualization. In this comparison, Splunk AppDynamics stands out for its comprehensive application insights and robust features, while Grafana shines in visualization customization and integration flexibility.
Features: Splunk AppDynamics offers robust JVM and hardware monitoring, response time tracking, and detailed transaction analysis. Its proactive alerting and automatic baselining enhance troubleshooting capabilities. Grafana provides strong dashboard customization, comprehensive integration options, and benefits from an active open-source community.
Room for Improvement: Splunk AppDynamics could enhance network monitoring, interface intuitiveness, and integration with newer technologies like Kubernetes. Its complex setup for alerts and dashboards, along with resource-heavy agents, remain areas for improvement. Grafana would benefit from better data aggregation capabilities, improved dashboard integration, and enhanced documentation for plugins.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk AppDynamics is praised for its strong customer support and technical assistance, offering guidance through deployment in multiple cloud environments. Grafana allows simple on-premises deployment, valued for its open-source nature, though it relies more on community support for customer service.
Pricing and ROI: Splunk AppDynamics is a premium option with a complex licensing model, justifying its cost by reducing downtime. In contrast, Grafana offers a free open-source version with additional paid tiers, providing a cost-effective solution, especially appealing to smaller organizations seeking powerful visualization tools without extensive investments.
According to errors, exceptions, and code-level details related to their application performance on a daily basis, the application development team tries to help with Splunk AppDynamics to reduce errors and exceptions, which helps the end users get application availability and feel more confident.
To understand the magnitude of it, when the company asked to replace Splunk AppDynamics with another tool, I indicated that for the proposed tool, we would need five people to do the analysis that Splunk AppDynamics enables me to do.
It's very hard to find ROI because we are currently focused only on the on-premises applications.
My advice for people who are new to Grafana or considering it is to reach out to the community mainly, as that's the primary benefit of Grafana.
I do not use Grafana's support for technical issues because I have found solutions on Stack Overflow and ChatGPT helps me as well.
Grafana's customer support is mainly for developers.
AppDynamics is much more helpful.
We got a contact, an account manager, to work directly with for technical support.
They help us resolve any issues raised by our team relating to operations, application instrumentation, or any other issues.
In terms of our company, the infrastructure is using two availability zones in AWS.
In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time.
We have reached maximum capacity in our tier, and extending capacity has not been cost-effective from Splunk's perspective.
I would rate the scalability of Splunk AppDynamics as a nine out of ten.
I did not find any Docker solution available with it, and a separate instance has to be installed.
When something in their dashboard does not work, because it is open source, I am able to find all the relative combinations that people are having, making it much easier for me to fix.
Once you get to a higher load, you need to re-evaluate your architecture and put that into account.
It is necessary to conduct appropriate testing before deploying them in production to prevent potential outages.
There are no issues or bugs with the 20.4 version; it is very stable with no functionality or operational issues.
I can rate it nine out of ten.
It would be better if they made the technology easy to use without needing to read extensive documentation.
Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs.
I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following different requests between different services could be more powerful.
Splunk AppDynamics does not support the complete MELT framework, which includes metrics, events, logging, and tracing for the entire stack.
If AppDynamics could develop a means to monitor without an agent, it could significantly improve application performance and reduce potential problems.
A good integration with Splunk would be very interesting, as Splunk is a good product for logs, and that part is currently missing in Splunk AppDynamics.
In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it.
Customers have to pay a premium price, however, they receive considerable value from the product.
All these solutions at the moment are cheap, but it is like paying for insurance; you pay insurance to avoid major damage.
We find its pricing reasonable and competitive.
Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data.
Its alerting feature is effective because it allows me to set thresholds to send an email if a certain threshold is met.
It's definitely useful for monitoring, alerting, logs, and analysis.
We have multiple tools, but end users prefer to use Splunk AppDynamics because their portal navigation is very simple and clear.
The feature that I appreciate in AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is the intuitive and user-friendly dynamic mapping it creates for workflows.
What I like the most about Splunk AppDynamics is the end-to-end observability for the application, along with traces.
Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics platform that stands out in the field of monitoring solutions. Grafana is widely recognized for its powerful, easy-to-set-up dashboards and visualizations. Grafana supports integration with a wide array of data sources and tools, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, MySQL, Splunk, and Elasticsearch, enhancing its versatility. Grafana has open-source and cloud options; the open-source version is a good choice for organizations with the resources to manage their infrastructure and want more control over their deployment. The cloud service is a good choice if you want a fully managed solution that is easy to start with and scale.
A key strength of Grafana lies in its ability to explore, visualize, query, and alert on the collected data through operational dashboards. These dashboards are highly customizable and visually appealing, making them a valuable asset for data analysis, performance tracking, trend spotting, and detecting irregularities.
Grafana provides both an open-source solution with an active community and Grafana Cloud, a fully managed and composable observability offering that packages together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. The open-source version is licensed under the Affero General Public License version 3.0 (AGPLv3), being free and unlimited. Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise are available for more advanced needs, catering to a wider range of organizational requirements. Grafana offers options for self-managed backend systems or fully managed services via Grafana Cloud. Grafana Cloud extends observability with a wide range of solutions for infrastructure monitoring, IRM, load testing, Kubernetes monitoring, continuous profiling, frontend observability, and more.
The Grafana users we interviewed generally appreciate Grafana's ability to connect with various data sources, its straightforward usability, and its integration capabilities, especially in developer-oriented environments. The platform is noted for its practical alert configurations, ticketing backend integration, and as a powerful tool for developing dashboards. However, some users find a learning curve in the initial setup and mention the need for time investment to customize and leverage Grafana effectively. There are also calls for clearer documentation and simplification of notification alert templates.
In summary, Grafana is a comprehensive solution for data visualization and monitoring, widely used across industries for its versatility, ease of use, and extensive integration options. It suits organizations seeking a customizable and scalable platform for visualizing time-series data from diverse sources. However, users should be prepared for some complexity in setup and customization and may need to invest time in learning and tailoring the system to their specific needs.
Splunk AppDynamics enhances application performance monitoring with advanced diagnostics and real-time insights, offering seamless end-to-end transaction tracking and infrastructure visibility.
AppDynamics provides critical tools for businesses to analyze application behavior and performance. Through innovative features like transaction snapshot analysis and adaptable dashboards, users can quickly identify and address issues, ensuring high levels of system uptime and efficiency. It is designed to support complex environments including Kubernetes and AWS, enhancing user experience by detecting performance issues early. Despite needing improvements in network monitoring and integration, it remains a robust option for tracking application health.
What are the key features of AppDynamics?In industries like financial services and e-commerce, AppDynamics facilitates performance tracking across distributed systems, optimizing infrastructure to meet consumer demands. It excels in environments needing precise transaction monitoring and is pivotal in delivering high value and satisfaction.
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