Grafana and Splunk ITSI compete in the data visualization and analytics category. Splunk ITSI appears to have the upper hand due to its analytical depth and automation capabilities.
Features: Grafana offers open-source flexibility and customization, integration with various data sources, and advanced visualization capabilities. Splunk ITSI provides advanced machine learning features, a powerful correlation engine for predictive insights, and extensive feature sets for comprehensive analysis.
Room for Improvement: Grafana users seek enhanced alerting capabilities, improved support options, and further user interface enhancements. Splunk ITSI users suggest reducing setup complexity, making the learning curve more intuitive, and streamlining the implementation process.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Grafana is noted for its straightforward deployment, particularly in cloud environments, and responsive community-driven support. Splunk ITSI requires a more complex deployment but has strong, dedicated customer support services.
Pricing and ROI: Grafana's open-source model offers cost-effectiveness with minimal setup costs. Splunk ITSI's premium pricing reflects its extensive features, and users find the ROI justifiable.
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.
The technical support is excellent, and I would rate it at ten.
In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time.
In terms of our company, the infrastructure is using two availability zones in AWS.
Splunk is highly scalable, with the ability to expand efficiently.
Once you get to a higher load, you need to re-evaluate your architecture and put that into account.
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.
The setup, however, must be done correctly as incorrect deployment can lead to issues.
Regarding the clarity of the official documentation for installation, I think the official documentation, which has something called Alloy, the Alloy integration, is not that clear.
I would give it a ten if it were much simpler for users who just want to get a simple objective in Grafana and are not experienced with technical configuration.
I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following different requests between different services could be more powerful.
I would appreciate additional features in the next release of Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) such as cloud infrastructure monitoring including CICDs, Kubernetes, and similar technologies.
Splunk ITSI could benefit from including more features that other solutions support, such as vulnerability management modules.
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.
Splunk ITSI tends to be more expensive compared to some open-source solutions.
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.
We can find information with Grafana much more quickly compared to DataDog because it was open source and there was extensive documentation about it, enabling us to fetch data or information much more quickly using AI tools.
The predictive analysis can give you proactive information about potential bottlenecks that can occur on applications, desk, storage, SQL servers, databases, or other systems.
Having features like IT Service Intelligence enhances our organization by providing actionable insights quickly, which is crucial for operational efficiency.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Grafana | 5.2% |
| Splunk ITSI (IT Service Intelligence) | 0.7% |
| Other | 94.1% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 13 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 23 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 11 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 9 |
| Large Enterprise | 32 |
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 IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) is a powerful analytics-driven monitoring and analytics solution that provides real-time insights into the health and performance of IT services.
It enables organizations to proactively identify and resolve issues, optimize service delivery, and improve overall IT operations. With its advanced machine learning capabilities, ITSI automatically detects anomalies, predicts future events, and prioritizes alerts based on business impact.
The solution offers a centralized view of IT services, allowing users to visualize and analyze data from multiple sources in a single dashboard. ITSI also provides customizable KPIs, service-level agreements (SLAs), and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and track service performance.
With its intuitive interface and powerful analytics capabilities, Splunk ITSI empowers IT teams to deliver reliable and efficient services, ensuring maximum uptime and customer satisfaction.
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