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Grafana vs Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
7.0
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Real User Monitoring...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
37th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Grafana is 6.3%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) is 0.4%, up from 0.2% 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.
Sathis-Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless issue detection with user time tracking and application load analysis
We primarily use Splunk Real User Monitoring to analyze performance bottlenecks and application transactions. It allows us to see how applications are experienced on the user side, making it easy to capture any bottlenecks or performance issues The most valuable features include user time…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Grafana is stable and has great engineers."
"I find Grafana beneficial due to its numerous plugins."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana is the ease to build dashboards from observability construction. Additionally, the page services and integration are good."
"It provides a graphical representation and it's clear to see what's happening."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"It gives us the visibility we need. I like that when we add deployment markers or release markers, we know exactly when an issue arises. For instance, if there is an increased usage of CPU, we can link it directly to the deployment that might have caused the issue. It increases productivity and observability. We can now easily tell when a certain issue arises. It's way easier to debug because it can point you to certain things based on these markers, and we can debug easier."
"Plugin: Connecting Grafana to multiple APIs of leading monitoring tools and alerting tools."
"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."
"Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) has one great advantage in that if they have SAP users, they can monitor their SAP applications."
"The most valuable features include user time tracking and the ability to analyze application load times."
"The most valuable features include user time tracking and the ability to analyze application load times."
"The initial setup of Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) was easy."
 

Cons

"More dashboard is required, out-of-the-box, for OpenNMS."
"I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients."
"It's difficult to see the trends on the graph when the range is too long."
"Multiple dashboards combined into one dashboard has slowed things down for us."
"I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation."
"Grafana could consider building its own metrics system to eliminate the reliance on other tools like Prometheus, providing a one-stop solution."
"Grafana could consider building its own metrics system to eliminate the reliance on other tools like Prometheus, providing a one-stop solution."
"In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time, which indicated a bottleneck that we had to address by updating the infrastructure."
"The initial setup of Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) was easy. The solution is deployed on-premises."
"Support from Splunk is not very helpful because Splunk doesn't have a dedicated APM; they only have one APM engineer in Korea."
"There is room for improvement in customer support due to delays and standard feedback responses."
"It would be beneficial to have more enhanced features with capabilities to adapt more integrated applications. Improvements in dashboard configuration, customization, and artificial intelligence functionalities are desired."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"The solution is expensive."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
26%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Retailer
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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?
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. That is pretty much great for us.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
The whole AI capability would be useful for Grafana in the future, and while I don't think we're mature yet, I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following differ...
What do you like most about Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM)?
The initial setup of Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) was easy.
What needs improvement with Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM)?
It would be beneficial to have more enhanced features with capabilities to adapt more integrated applications. Improvements in dashboard configuration, customization, and artificial intelligence fu...
What is your primary use case for Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM)?
We primarily use Splunk Real User Monitoring to analyze performance bottlenecks and application transactions. It allows us to see how applications are experienced on the user side, making it easy t...
 

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.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana vs. Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,585 professionals have used our research since 2012.