Grafana Reviews

I have used Grafana mainly to build custom dashboards. We haven't got Grafana Enterprise due to billing issues. I have used Grafana, installing it physically on a server to build custom dashboards using plug-ins. I have used Enterprise Grafana cloud for many integrations, like RabbitMQ, JMSQs, and datasets. We are mainly focused on dashboards and not on alerting.

Grafana's built-in integration with third-party tools, databases, and MQs is an amazing feature. Now they are leading many integration modules as well for RabbitMQ specifically. You will get a prebuilt dashboard. You have to configure the RabbitMQ, and you will have all the monitoring available. You don't have to actually develop a dashboard and identify what needs to be monitored.

Setting up alerts via Grafana is a bit complicated, and alerting needs to improve. We used Azure for our alerts and Grafana purely as a dashboard tool.

The solution's stability needs improvement.

I have been using Grafana for three to four years.

I have come across multiple issues with Grafana, like getting shut down automatically, the process getting killed, etc. Grafana, on a main level, is good, but the stability of the underneath platform supporting Grafana's UI needs to be improved.

I rate Grafana an eight out of ten for stability.

While using the Grafana open-source version, scalability will definitely be a big challenge because you are not using an enterprise version. Grafana's open-source version is not scalable. It's useful for small use cases and specific use cases. Using the Grafana open-source version will be challenging if you want to deploy a hundred applications and bring up a hundred dashboards for different reasons. While it is possible to do, you will end up having issues.

For open source, Grafana does not have technical support. It has an open forum where you can post your questions, and they will respond to you. However, their response on the open forum was good. Being an open-source solution, having a big community to support is an added advantage compared to other tools.

Grafana's deployment takes around two hours. It's not super complicated, and it's pretty straightforward. Everything is available on the internet. You can browse the internet and get a bunch of documents to complete the deployment.

Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost.

It's very good to start with the open source and very seamless. You can directly connect your data sources to the solution. You won't have to worry about managing the Grafana UI because Grafana comprises two things, namely, the data source where you are connecting and the dashboard. Getting started with Grafana Cloud is good because it's very seamless, good, and helpful. If you want to scale and use Grafana as an observability tool, I would say you have to think twice before choosing it because there are a lot of gaps, especially on the APM side of its application and performance monitoring side. The infrastructure gets complex as it scales. For a small use case, for independent use cases, or for building simple dashboards, I recommend Grafana.

With Grafana's open-source, you download a package, put it in your server, and run it. I've used Grafana Cloud as well. For Grafana open-source, the login is limited to two or three people. More people cannot log in, and you can create multiple users. You can create around five to six dashboards and use 10 to 12 plugins. If you have just one or two use cases to be used, like if you have order delivery and you are looking for a tool, Grafana is a great one because the integration is pretty simple.

Overall, I rate Grafana a nine out of ten.

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.

We are using Grafana for observability dashboards.

Grafana has helped our organization with observability and operational excellence. Operational excellence is a key part of any organization from a data platform perspective and setting the alerts and monitoring policies on Grafana was easy.

The most valuable feature of Grafana is the ease to build dashboards from observability construction. Additionally, the page services and integration are good.

The look and feel of the charting and graph capabilities in Grafana could improve. If they provided a storyboard type of feature as they have in other solutions, such as PowerBI. The multi-tenanted and stitch metrics features could improve.

I have been using Grafana for a couple of years.

The stability of Grafana is good. I have not seen any issues.

Grafana has been scalable in the pipelines we have used it in. We have 10,000 web links for 10,000 Grafana dashboards.

I have not used the support from Grafana.

We had set up our own monitoring and metrics dashboards and custom dashboards prior to Grafana.

I have not set up Grafana but my team has found it easy to do. We have an automated setup of Grafana. Every new pipeline gets created, and it creates a deep link into a Grafana dashboard.

Grafana is good as a solution because it is easy to offset monitoring and alerting policies in Grafana.

I rate Grafana a nine out of ten.

We use it to monitor user behavior. We have AI LLM models in NVIDIA Triton. NVIDIA Triton gives us some metrics. These metrics are integrated with Grafana and Prometheus. We monitor user traffic to visualize metrics like p99 latency, increase in user and CPU performance, utilization of the GPUs, RAM utilization, and CPU utilization.

We use the free templates of the solution. We have tested some alerts on metrics. We like the alert features. We plan to use it more. Slack and PagerDuty alerts in Grafana are helpful.

It was pretty complicated to integrate the product into our workflow. We relied on templates we found on the GitHub open-source repositories. It is pretty hard to integrate Grafana and set it up according to our use case. The solution must provide tutorials and guides.

We are a small team. We don't have the time to learn Grafana end-to-end, but we want some guides to help us use it quickly. Prebuilt templates will help a lot. The product must provide more alerting metrics. It must be integrated with iOS and Android mobile phones.

I have been using the solution for four months.

The tool’s stability is quite good. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability a six out of ten. Scaling is complex. We have four developers in the organization who use the product.

We have good Docker experience, so the setup was pretty straightforward. We had to run a couple of Docker commands. We integrated everything with Docker Compose. As we scale up, the setup will get complicated. If the number of users increases, we might consider switching to the cloud.

Compared to Elasticsearch, ELK Stack, and Logstash, Grafana is pretty strong. Grafana is way ahead of its competitors. SigNoz is also an alternative to Grafana and Prometheus. SigNoz is pretty easy to set up.

We haven't worked or dived deep into the documentation and tutorial. I will recommend the product to users willing to take the time and patience to set up and learn Grafana in-depth. There are a lot of tools that we can use to build excellent integrations and get the most out of them with little knowledge. However, to leverage the value of Grafana and Prometheus, we must learn the tools in depth. It will save us time, and we can get much value if we invest time and effort. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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.

I was using a restricted version of Grafana where I didn't have the option to create alerts and didn't have direct options to build dashboards. We used the already built-in dashboards there. Therefore, the most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool where we got better clarity on the issues to select the timeline and see the data or charts. So, the visualization tool is the most valuable feature I found.

It could be more user-friendly. For example, if I need to build a chart, I first need to sit and learn something on Grafana to write a query to create a chart, it is not user-friendly. 

Its UI features to create charts can also be improved. Some features could have a link to the documentation. 

Another thing I would like is the alerting feature because it was not there in the version I was using.

Grafana is a stable product because with whatever frequency I have used this tool, I have never faced any downtime. Grafana's dashboard is stable.

It is a scalable product because we used Grafana on-prem, with only one server. If we need to add more Grafana servers, it is possible.

I did not use Grafana that much as it was a built-in application of the company I worked at.

Grafana does not have straightforward documentation or direct answers on help pages. I would suggest Grafana users get support from another user or someone who already has used Grafana. While using Grafana, we need to understand how the queries are written to build a new chart. A new user would need to explore it, how it works, how to install it, etc. It would make it easier to use Grafana.

I give Grafana a rating of six out of ten because it is not very user-friendly. It also needs clear documentation and requires time to get started.

The primary use case of the solution is to create business and technical dashboards in the metrics provided by the services through Prometheus.

The solution has improved our organization by providing a centralized way to instantly see our business, technical, and service metrics.

The most valuable features are the user-friendly interface and the ability to connect with many data sets.

The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable.

Previously we used New Relic before switching to the solution.

The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud.

The solution was implemented in-house with a few clicks.

I have seen a return on investment.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

There are 40 people using the solution in our organization and it requires three people to maintain it.

I would recommend you try to use as many tools as you can. You can have an ecosystem that is quiet and works like using Temple, Prometheus, and so on.

We use the tool to monitor metrics on dashboards. 

It's easy to make changes. We can put many dashboards in one place. There's no delay in showing data - what you see on Grafana matches the server metrics.

Grafana could improve by having its own query language. Currently, it uses languages like Prometheus or InfluxDB, which not everyone knows. Their query language should be easier.

I have been using the product for four years. 

Stability-wise, our on-premises version was mixed, but the cloud version is stable.

My company has 2000 users. 

Setting up Grafana is moderately difficult, especially writing query languages and custom metrics. Creating custom metrics requires writing new query language at the server level, which can be challenging.

If you want to use Grafana for the first time, I'd say you can. It's cost-effective compared to other products like Datadog. But if cost isn't an issue, I'd recommend Datadog. For beginners, learning to use Grafana is moderately difficult. I rate it a seven out of ten.