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Grafana vs Sumo Logic Observability comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.0
Users and managers find Grafana valuable for cost-effective data visualization, enhancing application and infrastructure insights.
Sentiment score
7.0
Sumo Logic Observability improved operational efficiency, reduced downtime, and provided better issue resolution, visibility, stability, and proactive IT management.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
Grafana users appreciate community support and prompt formal assistance, with enterprise users benefiting from knowledgeable representatives and helpful guides.
Sentiment score
7.8
Sumo Logic Observability's customer service is highly rated, with quick responses and helpful support, particularly for advanced and OpenTelemetry issues.
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.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.8
Grafana is scalable and effective for monitoring, though costs and complexity rise with larger deployments or open-source versions.
Sentiment score
7.3
Sumo Logic Observability scales efficiently for diverse users, handling peak records with ease, supported by Fluent Bit and OpenTelemetry.
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.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Grafana is highly stable, with most users experiencing smooth operation and minimal issues, rating its reliability very high.
Sentiment score
8.8
Sumo Logic Observability is highly reliable, with users experiencing no issues and rating its reliability a perfect ten for enterprises.
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.
 

Room For Improvement

Grafana needs improvements in security, usability, data correlation, integration, and flexibility, with enhanced reporting, machine learning, and user interface.
The system requires efficiency improvements in data usage, cost management, enrichment, search interface, query speed, and pre-built dashboards.
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.
Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs.
 

Setup Cost

Grafana provides open-source for free and enterprise versions vary in cost based on metrics, plugins, and features.
<p>Sumo Logic Observability provides flexible, competitive pricing for enterprises, but additional costs may apply for advanced features and high data volumes.</p>
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.
 

Valuable Features

Grafana offers intuitive dashboards, strong integration, powerful visualizations, live monitoring, and extensive plugins, making it ideal for development teams.
Sumo Logic Observability offers real-time alerting, apps, team collaboration, easy integration, and a flexible query language, boosting incident resolution.
Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data.
The feature that sets Grafana apart from its competitors is how easy it is to set up data sources.
It's definitely useful for monitoring, alerting, logs, and analysis.
 

Categories and Ranking

Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Sumo Logic Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
22nd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (16th), AIOps (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Grafana is 6.2%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sumo Logic Observability is 0.3%, up from 0.1% 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.
Shamshir Nangla - PeerSpot reviewer
Getting up and running is easy, even for a newbie but management of searches definitely needs improvement
Operational effectiveness with regards to when there's an issue, when there's a reactive issue, people are able to, or as well as proactively, actually, because we use their PagerDuty integrations. We use queries in Sumo Logic to trigger alerts based on logging. That allows us to proactively identify issues as they're happening. With those same alerts, obviously, with that platform, you can use it to reactively start looking at troubleshooting issues as they're happening right then and there or incidents. So it's been very, very good for alerting and for troubleshooting issues. For predicting issues before they happen, it is not very good. They have a feature called anomaly detection, but I think it's quite premature compared to other stuff out there. So it's good for alerts and for troubleshooting operational effectiveness. When your operations are down or segregated, it's perfect because it will help you diagnose the issues.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Transportation Company
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 needs improvement with Sumo Logic Observability?
The speed of queries could be improved. When using more advanced functions, especially with large datasets like the 90-day log retention we had, queries could be slow, sometimes taking up to five m...
What is your primary use case for Sumo Logic Observability?
We used it for log observability – log aggregation specifically.
 

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. Sumo Logic Observability and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.