Grafana Reviews

It's for monitoring our infrastructure. They have some databases and some applications running Java. There are some Kubernetes and old Kubernetes deployments. The company wanted to visualize the logs and send some application sys logs. This is the main utilization.

It's a web application, Tomcat application, Java application, and database application. They are the main focus for collecting the application or system logs.

There is no agent to install. There are many dashboards also. 

There is an active community where you can gather a lot of information about how the solution works. I come from Splunk. If I compare it with Splunk, Splunk has its own SPL, for example. You can play with the dashboard. There is some advantages in common with SPL. Visualization and collecting logs it's similar. However, Grafana is trying to cover many types of open-source infrastructure. This is why I appreciate Grafana versus, for example, Splunk.

The initial setup is not difficult. 

It is a stable, reliable product. 

They are doing well in terms of improvements they're making. They progressed much in dashboarding. However, it's very, very complicated when you start to understand how you make dashboards. You need to figure out how you collect and source your logs, for example. In the area of documentation, they must do a better job. Splunk documentation is much more organized than Grafana. Since it's open-source, you have to test your infrastructure more. You need to really understand it before you install it. 

It would be helpful if they simplified the data source.

I've used the solution for about a year. 

It is a stable solution. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

You have to plan. You have a certain number or gigabit of logs that you can index. You also have a limited number of series. For users, I don't remember if we had any issues adding users. However, there is a cost per the size of the logs or the number of series. Scaling will drive costs up. Right now, our IT and development team is on the product. They are encouraging other departments to try it out. 

The department where we worked has used support. We had to collaborate with Grafana since sometimes we were applying some solution that was not working. The logs were not coming and there were some errors. We had to open tickets and deal with the supplier to resolve the issues.

From my experience, when dealing with Splunk, for example, it's a big company and sometimes I have to deal with people that have no knowledge. However, with Grafana, we don't have that issue. They are good.

In one company, they asked me to play with Grafana and Prometheus. I've used them both.

I've used Splunk as well. It's not an open-source product. 

It is very easy to set up the solution. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

It's a couple of months before you start. For example, for a company that doesn't have any experience, they need to take time to understand it, especially if they only have a sys admin and not a senior person. 

In our case, we did a lot of testing and installed it on a virtual machine. You do have a couple of months to play with it before you decide to go into production. 

We have a license. The pricing varies. It depends on the number of metrics that you want to ingest per day.

We are a customer and end-user.

If you use this product for the first time, I would encourage you to try some sort of live demo. Go to see the product in action and understand how it works, and test it. To install it in the cloud, you can have a free license at the start or a limited license for some events. You can try to play with the product and create some dashboarding to ingest some logs. 

You don't have to install the whole thing as it's complicated to install the whole product, and you need many machines, CPUs, and memory. It's a good idea to try it out in a small way to see if it fits your needs or if you like it.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. I had a good experience testing the solution.

This is a good solution for companies that are using, for example, open source or Linux options for all the tools or those coming from the world of open source.

I use Grafana for MYSQL monitoring, monitoring the system, and application monitoring.

The best thing about Grafana is the visualization. The colors and the ease of use make it very user-friendly. Grafana has a huge community, so we can simply Google it and get the answer if we have any doubts.

The second best thing about Grafana is its alerting system, which is easy to define within Grafana rather than defining alerts in Prometheus.

Thirdly, Grafana is completely free of cost. I use Grafana for many things, and all of them at zero-dollar cost. On the other hand, other monitoring tools in the market, like New Relic and Datadog, offer many features, but Grafana is a good monitoring tool for a small-scale company.

One thing I got to know is that Grafana doesn't provide anything for reporting. As a DevOps engineer, I would like to get a weekly report expressing the system's overall performance in the last week. For example, how many alerts were triggered, how many APIs responded with bad requests, and how many failures occurred? All these things are generally required at the beginning of the week so that we can better research and optimize everything that's required.

Currently, Grafana sends a PDF version of the report, and they are not doing anything beyond that. So, that's a feature that Grafana can work on to make it more accurate and better.

In the additional features, I would like to see logs. Logs are basically created when an API is hit. The log contains information such as the API that was hit, the status code, and the time taken. For instance, the log file would store the error message if there was an error in the API. It makes it easier for the developer to debug the API that showed an error. Grafana claims that it has Loki, which is used for logging and saving logs. However, I could not configure Loki with Grafana to see my logs. Grafana could look into this field and make changes to improve it.

I have been using this solution for three months now. I am using the latest version, 7.4.

Grafana is stable. There were some bugs in the previous version, but the latest version is bug-free.

Grafana is scalable for product-based companies, but for service-based companies with multiple projects, it's difficult to scale using Grafana. However, since it provides all the features for free, it's manageable.

We are a small company of 70 people, and I am currently the only one using Grafana. We started using it after I researched and decided to use Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring.

The customer support team of Grafana is available for the enterprise and pro versions. However, there is a vast community of Grafana users, and if you require any help, you can post your query, and you will undoubtedly receive an answer. Most likely, your question may have already been asked and answered in the community forum, so checking there first is worthwhile.

Setting up Grafana can be a bit tricky. If I rate the difficulty level on a scale of one to ten, I would say it's around five. But once you have connected one data source, it becomes easier to connect with other things.

Grafana is not entirely open source, as it has three versions: the free, enterprise, and pro versions. Most of the required features are available in the free version of Grafana, which you will use as a visualization tool, while Prometheus will serve as your monitoring tool.

Therefore, you won't use Grafana as a monitoring tool. If you use Grafana's features, they are free of charge. Hence, you can use Prometheus and Grafana to fulfill your needs. However, if you are using MongoDB as your database, its plugin is not available in the free version of Grafana, and you'll need to purchase the enterprise version.

I will be able to comment on whether Grafana is useful for you or not, depending on various factors. For instance, I would like to know the scale of your company, the products you are making, the scale of production, and whether you are a product-based or service-based company. Additionally, I would like to know what other features you require from your monitoring system.

If Grafana meets your criteria, I suggest using it because it is either free or comes at a cost. The free version of Grafana is usually sufficient for most users.

Overall, I would rate Grafana an eight out of ten.

We use Grafana to visualize IT infrastructure monitoring data. We have real-time, historical, and trend data that we can visualize in a flexible manner using Grafana. We use Zabbix to collect, process, and store the data. Zabbix has its own inbuilt visualization widgets, dashboards, and graphs, however, Grafana adds more flexibility. We have integrated Zabbix with Grafana using the Zabbix API which gives access to almost all components of the Zabbix Software.

Our environment is on-premises so we have both Zabbix and Grafana locally installed.

Grafana has greatly improved the way we visualize monitoring data. Now, every team member from directors, managers, sales representatives, to technical engineers can be granted access to custom dashboards relevant to their line of work.

With the latest Grafana versions, reports can be generated from dashboards to update senior management officers. 

The dashboards are not only intuitive and insightful, but they are also beautiful so it makes monitoring and data visualization more enjoyable.

Since it can easily be integrated with other software, having that important part of data processing taken care of makes technical teams more focused on improving data sources and enriching the data.

The ability to create almost all kinds of graphs and visualize any kind of information in an appealing way is extremely useful to us.

The customizability of dashboards and widgets is impressive.

The flexibility in integration with other tools as data sources of data enriching tools has been great.

It is open-source, so it saves a lot on costs and the community is friendly and powerful.

The product can be used to cater to multiple use cases. Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable.

The ability to import and export dashboards saves us a lot of time for popular systems and dashboards.

The lack of native ability to aggregate data from multiple sources could be improved. As it is not a data store, it is challenging to correlate data from multiple data sources. Adding an out-of-box capability to aggregate and correlate different types of data would make Grafana even better.

It is limited on the reporting type supported, which is important for managerial-level officers who want reports that are either general or specific. Improvements in that area would be great.

Machine learning capabilities are still limited. This is an improvement in that area is needed.

Performance improvement when querying and searching textual data would be beneficial.

I've used the solution for more than a year.

When computing resources are properly optimized Grafana runs in a quite stable manner. As Grafana is an analytics and visualization platform, it is a bit hungry on CPU and Memory usage. When Grafana instances are properly planned and configured, computing resources bottlenecks can be avoided. Our instances haven't given us headaches from the time we set them up. 

Grafana is mainly for visualization, so many instances can be set as needed. Grafana can also be configured for high availability for some scenarios like alerting, authentication, and databases.

We haven't bought technical support and haven't dealt with their customer service agents.

We used native dashboards and graphs of another system we use. We use Zabbix for monitoring but we added Grafana to add more visualization flexibility.

The initial setup was straightforward, however, some resource optimization and tuning were needed. We have experienced professionals in tuning OS systems and application resources so it was not too complex for us.

We implemented everything fully in-house. Since we never had a vendor team, we don't know yet the level of expertise they have. The Grafana community has been so helpful in this regard.

I can confidently say we have a 100% return on investment. Grafana has greatly enriched our data visualization and analytics. We see the prospect of it appealing even to more senior management. They may not be quite technical, but they appreciate having data nicely visualized so they know what is going on.

You can choose from the fully open-source or enterprise editions. We chose the open-source and did everything in-house. Thorough planning and performance considerations are important, as the tool can be heavy on memory and computing resources.

We considered Kibana before we chose this solution.

The solution is great and is one of the best in the market for visualization.

We're getting the data from the CA team to Grafana, just feeding the data here from there. I used to create the standard dashboards and the custom dashboards based on the user's request.

We use the product in a logistics project where I used it for creating the dashboard for the packages and delivery kind of logistics projects.

There are multiple data fields we can create and graph models and gauge models. There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful. 

The solution is stable.

Support is helpful.

I don't have any notes for improvement. 

There are some areas of network drives that are not showing as expected based on server usage. On the server, it was showing in GB model. However, in Grafana, It is in bytes. Therefore, the calculation it was not showing correctly. That is something that needs to be changed by the vendor team. 

The initial setup is not necessarily straightforward.

I've been using the solution for two and a half years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There aren't bugs. It's not glutchy. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

The product works for monitoring as well, including log monitoring, monitoring, and alerting. However, we are using just the dashboard. Therefore, I cannot give my view on whether it is scalable or not.

We have about seven admins and 20 users on the solution. 

As Grafana is involved with the DX APM, we used to reach out to the vendor about any issues on the Grafana related to the DX APM. They had good expertise on Grafana and helped us a lot.

I've used other solutions. Grafana graph in representation is more clear for users. They like the view better. Any application has performance issues. We can set up the thresholds on the dashboard to 90% critical and 80% as warnings. We can update those values in the dashboards if we want. It is very colorful with multiple colors to differentiate things. It's just easier to use than anything else.

The initial setup isn't straightforward. Users need to learn the product first. At that point, it becomes easier. 

There isn't really a deployment so much as a one-time integration from the APM for Grafana.

Whenever we create a new agent or an existing agent is used to create the dashboard in Grafana, it normally takes one or two hours to create one dashboard. One dashboard means it has multiple panels like CPU, memory, and application back and front end.

There are a lot of panels. If the user request has very minimal panels, then it takes just 30 minutes to an hour. If they need multiple panels and multiple windows for the graph on a dashboard, then it takes two to three hours to complete it.

Once it is set up, the solution is easy to maintain. 

I handled the deployment myself. 

I was involved in the Broadcom DX APM. I did some POCs and created the dashboard. 

There is a feature called DX Dashboards there. It was used in the Lucene queries, and the dashboards are very innovative, and users like it a lot based on the dashboards.

We're using the solution that's the latest version. 

If a potential customer is already into any other dashboard view, I would advise them to create one free license and create dashboards and observe how it looks compared to their existing dashboard. That way, they'd be able to compare and see which would be better for them.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use Grafana for application metrics and data utilization for consumer databases. We also use it to connect and evaluate clients and create databases where we upload client data.

We find Grafana essential for our company because of the visualization function for all application metrics in our environment.

What I found most valuable in Grafana is that it has a lot of integrations and features that I need for data processing and visualization.

One area for improvement in Grafana is that depending on your version, you have to pay for the features, making the license expensive. It would be great if the licensing model could be more flexible.

In the next release of Grafana, I want cluster creation to be available, which would help in Grafana deployment and scaling. Currently, the scaling process for the solution is a bit complicated.

Easier integration is also what I want to see in Grafana in the future.

I've been using Grafana for four years.

Grafana is a very stable solution.

Scaling Grafana is a bit complicated, so I want to create a cluster to promote high availability in the solution, deploy in one step, and for Grafana to scale automatically.

My company has the open-source version of Grafana, so it gets support from the community. The community support is good.

In terms of standalone visualization tools, I've only used Grafana. I used another monitoring solution, but the visualization was only integrated.

Other solutions can provide what Grafana provides, but you need to pay. Grafana, on the other hand, has an open-source version, and as an open-source solution, it's complete, at least for my company's needs.

Compared to other software, it can take some time to get used to how Grafana works, but you can live with it because you can learn to use it.

One person deployed Grafana for my company, and the process only took twenty minutes maximum.

My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free.

I'm currently using Grafana.

My company is a Grafana customer.

I'm using the open-source version of Grafana, 9.3.

Between sixty and one hundred people, mostly software engineers, use the solution in my company.

Grafana requires maintenance, and that's the responsibility of the entire team.

There's a plan to increase the usage of Grafana in other areas besides engineering. My company plans to create dashboards for data in other areas.

I advise people who want to use the solution to try it out first. For example, Grafana has many good integrations if you need to gather metrics, and you can technically use any query to create dashboards and graphs inside Grafana. I advise that you explore the solution.

My rating for Grafana is eight out of ten because it's a very good product. It's complete and has an open-source version with many features. However, some of its interface capabilities could be cheaper.

We used Grafana to monitor our traffic.

The best feature was the creation of graphs and trends to know if the traffic was low or okay. We could create week-over-week traffic and trend analysis as well. All these features were good and were the only features I used.

If there was an issue on one node, we couldn't drill down and see all the issues on other nodes or see if there were interlinked issues. However, Datadog allowed us to do this. In Datadog, we could take our complete environment and see what nodes went down simultaneously and the cause. For example, Datadog allows you to see in the graphs whether the database is locked or if there was a firewall issue. However, in Grafana, we had to add everything into a single dashboard manually.

In the next release, there should be more of a colour palette. The colour palette in Grafana is limited, and it chooses its own. We used hundreds of services to monitor into a single graph, so in the stacked chart, it chose the colour needs, and when we wanted to change it, there were only four or five options.

I used this solution when I worked for Expedia. We used the solution for about three years.

There were no breakdowns or hiccups.

I am unaware of the scalability. There were around 500 users when I worked there. The network team was using it on a large scale.

I don't believe that Grafana fulfilled the requirements completely. That's why we moved to Datadog.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We had a password issue at a point, but I am unsure if that was an issue with the solution or just within the organization.

Grafana was not an open source, and we had to pay for a license to use it. The same was the case with CashPoint. There was a license, but I'm unaware of how much we were paying.

I believe my old company chose Grafana because they initially wanted to monitor the traffic and know the firewall and scaling.

I rate Grafana a six out of ten because Grafana has limited options compared to Datadog. Regarding advice, it was pretty simple to use Grafana. The trickiest part was creating a new dashboard, working on the query and adding the requirement. So you have to have the source and path handy to put that in the query. Any user can use Grafana once they understand what the dashboards are doing and what data is being searched from those dashboards.

Our company uses the solution as a monitoring tool that provides alerts and behavior information. We have many Spring Boot applications and the solution works well with them. 

The solution is adaptable, easy to use, and works well for microservices development. 

Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model.

It is difficult to manage defects because the solution does not provide granular details about the internal system for tracing. 

Writing queries can be a bit difficult because the syntax must be maintained. The dependency on syntax should be removed so that it does not matter for queries. 

I have been using the solution for two years. 

The solution has some stability issues because I don't always see proper results. In comparison to other tools, it is not the most stable when using extensive SRE techniques. 

Dynatrace and ELK are more stable but are more costly. An organization that needs strong stability and has a bigger budget could consider these tools.  

Stability, features, or quality should not be based on cost. It is important to compare SRE models to find the best for your environment. 

I have never needed technical support. 

The initial setup is easy for on-premises. You install, integrate, and immediately see the visualization. 

I am not sure about the ease of cloud or enterprise-level setups. 

We implemented the solution in-house. 

I use the open source model so it is free. 

In the SRE model, there are many tools evolving but the solution is a good starting point for SRE with Spring Boot. Once you become familiar with SRE and are clear about the terminology, you can explore other products. Other users will say ELK or Dynatrace are good, but the best solution depends on your requirements. 

SRE is a journey that is uncovered as you progress. The solution is adaptable, easy to configure, works for microservices development, and integrates with Spring Boot so it is the best product for starting points. 

The solution is a visualization tool that is pretty easy to use. Writing queries can be difficult so it is important to learn how to integrate with data sources before you write queries to visualize those metrics. 

I rate the solution a six out of ten. 

We use this solution primarily for data monitoring, specifically payment transaction monitoring. For example, we use it to monitor payments passing through our systems, integrate with different parties, and track the metrics of payments. The support team can view all these items on a dashboard to gauge the threshold of payments.

The query patch is the most valuable feature. We can write queries in different languages, which is beneficial for visualization.

The product could be improved with a feature that provides detailed error messages when we encounter issues. For example, we had a case where there was an error message and we could not decipher what went wrong. Additionally, the product's configuration for saving files could be improved, and more plugins could be provided when using the dashboards.

We have been using this solution for approximately two years as customers. We deploy this solution on-premises.

The solution has been stable for us. We can integrate our single internal sign-on into the solution. 

The solution is scalable and we can add people on without any issues. Additionally, we can integrate our single internal sign-on into the solution. About 40% percent of the engineers in the company are using this solution.

We have not had any experience with customer service and support yet.

Unfortunately, I would not be able to comment on the initial setup as I wasn't involved in the setup process.

Unfortunately, I cannot comment on licensing and pricing costs as I am unaware of the pricing details.

We chose this solution because it met the requirements of visualizing and monitoring to make decisions. We found it had very good industrial usage from the reports we read when Space X launched.

I rate this solution a six out of ten. Nevertheless, we recommend using this solution and advise others to go through the tutorial videos before using it. The solution is good but it could be improved by including features that provide more detailed error messages as well as additional plugin options for the dashboard.