Splunk Observability Cloud and Grafana compete in the application performance and monitoring category. Grafana seems to have the upper hand due to its open-source nature, which reduces costs and offers robust plugin support for data visualization needs, appealing to budget-sensitive users.
Features: Splunk Observability Cloud provides detailed reporting, robust log analysis, and seamless data integration. It enhances operational efficiency with real-time problem-solving and tracing capabilities. Its customizable dashboards offer insights into security and application performance across diverse environments. Grafana excels in visualization, with strong support for creating detailed dashboards. It stands out for its flexibility, integrating various data sources and benefiting from open-source advantages, making it highly adaptable.
Room for Improvement: Splunk Observability Cloud faces challenges with high licensing costs and complex configurations. Users seek improved tool integration, endpoint protection, and automation. Grafana could enhance its ease of setup and user interface. Expanding machine learning capabilities and improving documentation are suggested, alongside enhancing reporting features to meet managerial expectations.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk Observability Cloud supports quick deployment models, including on-premises and hybrid cloud. While technical support is generally praised, responsiveness can occasionally be an issue. Grafana, due to its open-source nature, offers straightforward initial deployments, commonly in on-premises environments. However, support relies heavily on community resources, lacking the direct support options found in Splunk.
Pricing and ROI: Splunk Observability Cloud's advanced features come at a high cost, which can be a deterrent, yet users often justify it with strong ROI in visibility and productivity. In contrast, Grafana's open-source model significantly reduces costs, with many users finding the free version sufficient. While some enterprise features require licensing, Grafana is generally more favorable for budget-sensitive scenarios, demonstrating positive ROI without heavy financial burden.
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.
They often require multiple questions, with five or six emails to get a response.
They did respond to us, but they did not explicitly inform us about the feature's absence.
If any issues arise, we can raise a vendor case, and resolutions are provided in a timely and accurate manner.
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've used the solution across more than 250 people, including engineers.
I would rate its scalability an eight out of ten.
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.
I would rate its stability a nine out of ten.
We rarely have problems accessing the dashboard or the page.
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.
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available.
Customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and process terms.
It would be beneficial if server details could be retrieved directly in synthetic monitoring.
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.
It appears to be expensive compared to competitors.
Splunk Observability Cloud is expensive.
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.
For troubleshooting, we can detect problems in seconds, which is particularly helpful for digital teams.
It offers unified visibility for logs, metrics, and traces.
Splunk APM provides a holistic view of the application.
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 Observability Cloud combines log search, data integration, and dashboards for seamless monitoring, enhancing infrastructure visibility and security. Its cloud integration and scalability support diverse environments, improving operational efficiency.
Splunk Observability Cloud offers comprehensive monitoring tools with user-friendly interfaces, enabling end-to-end infrastructure visibility. Its real-time alerting and predictive capabilities enhance security monitoring, while centralized dashboards provide cross-platform visibility. Users benefit from fast data integration and extensive insights into application performance. Despite its advantages, improvements could be made in integration with other tools, data reliability, scalability, and cost management. Users face challenges in configuration complexity and require better automation and endpoint protection features. Enhancing AI integration, alerts, and adaptation for high-throughput services could further improve usability.
What are the key features of Splunk Observability Cloud?In industries like finance and healthcare, Splunk Observability Cloud is implemented for application performance monitoring and infrastructure metrics. Its ability to track incidents and analyze machine data benefits network infrastructure, while distributed tracing and log analysis aid in tackling security threats. Organizations often integrate it for compliance and auditing purposes, enhancing visibility into network traffic and optimizing performance.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
