The solution is used for monitoring the live monitoring of our load test.
Senior Specialist at Qualitest
The solution has a good UI dashboard, is easy to deploy, and is easy to monitor data
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."
- "I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data.
What needs improvement?
The solution's integration with other tools needs improvement.
I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for over three years.
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August 2026
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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We currently have over 50 people using the solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment usually takes one and a half hours.
What other advice do I have?
I give the solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Associate at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
A good starting point for SRE but managing defects is difficult without granular details
Pros and Cons
- "Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
- "The solution is adaptable, easy to use, and works well for microservices development."
- "Writing queries can be a bit difficult because the syntax must be maintained."
- "The solution has some stability issues because I don't always see proper results."
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
I have never needed technical support.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented the solution in-house.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I use the open source model so it is free.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Buyer's Guide
Grafana
August 2026
Learn what your peers think about Grafana. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2026.
912,006 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Engineering Manager at Alice
You can create dashboards to instantly see your business, technical, and service metrics
Pros and Cons
- "The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
- "The solution has improved our organization by providing a centralized way to instantly see our business, technical, and service metrics."
- "The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
What is our primary use case?
The primary use case of the solution is to create business and technical dashboards in the metrics provided by the services through Prometheus.
How has it helped my organization?
The solution has improved our organization by providing a centralized way to instantly see our business, technical, and service metrics.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features are the user-friendly interface and the ability to connect with many data sets.
What needs improvement?
The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is scalable.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously we used New Relic before switching to the solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud.
What about the implementation team?
The solution was implemented in-house with a few clicks.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Can monitor metrics on dashboards but needs to have own query language
Pros and Cons
- "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."
What is our primary use case?
We use the tool to monitor metrics on dashboards.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the product for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability-wise, our on-premises version was mixed, but the cloud version is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
My company has 2000 users.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Google
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
System Administrator at TZ Telecom Ltd.
Customizable, flexible, open source dashboarding tool supporting a lot of data sources
Pros and Cons
- "Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable."
- "It is limited on the reporting type supported, which is important for managerial-level officers who want reports that are either general or specific."
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for more than three years
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
We haven't bought technical support and haven't dealt with their customer service agents.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We considered Kibana before we chose this solution.
What other advice do I have?
The solution is great and is one of the best in the market for visualization.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
System Engineer / Systems & Storage at Vernity
A tool that users can understand and learn quickly to use
Pros and Cons
- "The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
- "I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation."
What is our primary use case?
I use Grafana since it is interconnected with Zabbix. I also use Grafana for the dashboard of machines from VMware and for some network devices connected to Zabbix.
What is most valuable?
The ability to use Grafana with Zabbix is a valuable feature for me. Zabbix provides me with alerts and information if something goes wrong, while Grafana offers a better dashboard that is more stable. If you know Grafana well, it can show you everything, like the uptime of different sources and other areas.
What needs improvement?
I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation. There is a problem in the area of some graphs where you connect elements. With Grafana, there is only one name that can be included for ten hours. In Grafana, only one big field with one text name is shown in the documentation. When it comes to production, it is only for a period of time that some fields on each side give the information they have. I researched on Google and other forums and saw that people face problems when they can't connect a field with the same value. The aforementioned area in the tool needs improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Grafana for nine months. I am a customer of the product.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have always had a stable version of the product. In general, I have not had any issues with the product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The technical personnel in my company use the tool, and it is possible to add or delete devices and other statuses in the solution. Around five people in my company use the product.
How are customer service and support?
I have always used the online forums or the internet to find information related to the product. I have not contacted the tool's technical support.
How was the initial setup?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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. I don't know if there are different paid versions of the product.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
My company chose Grafana over other products in the market considering its integration capabilities with Zabbix, good documentation, and the many topics about the tool that are available on the internet.
What other advice do I have?
I would suggest Grafana to those who use Zabbix because it helps users get a lot of information on networks and resolve a lot of problems.
I could do everything in Grafana with the help of graphs and documentation and get information on different types of devices.
I rate the overall tool an eight to nine out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Information Technology Operations Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Good dashboard and user forums but needs more plugins
Pros and Cons
- "The dashboards are very easy to work with."
- "There are not a lot of plugins for financial market monitoring."
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution in a financial institution to monitor applications and infrastructure.
What is most valuable?
We really only started.
So far, the management is very good.
The dashboards are very easy to work with.
It's a fantastic tool.
Support is helpful. There are many useful forums users can turn to as well.
It can scale.
The stability is good.
What needs improvement?
There are not a lot of plugins for financial market monitoring. Our old tool had more plugin capabilities.
We need more AI features. We need more data analytics and monitoring done by AI.
For how long have I used the solution?
We just started using the solution. We haven't used it for that long.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very stable. There are no issues with reliability. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I'd rate the scalability nine out of ten. It can extend well.
How are customer service and support?
The team that is implementing the solution has relied quite a bit on the support and forums, and so far, it has been helpful. So far, we are satisfied with the level of support on offer.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used to use a different solution. It had very specific tools for fixed message monitoring, among other features, that were useful for finance companies. Grafana doesn't have much that tailors to our sector.
How was the initial setup?
I was not involved in the implementation. I work with the team that has implemented it.
What other advice do I have?
We're a customer and end-user.
We are likely using the latest version of the solution. I'm not sure of the version number.
I'd rate the solution six out of ten. So far, I can't say it's doing more than our older monitoring was doing.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Technical Lead
Great heat maps and dashboards with decent reliability
Pros and Cons
- "The solution can scale well."
- "The formatting could be better."
What is our primary use case?
We primarily use the solution for site visibility.
How has it helped my organization?
It helps us monitor our applications and their performance, including CPU.
What is most valuable?
The heat maps are great.
We like the dashboards on offer.
It's a stable product.
The solution can scale well.
Pricing isn't overly expensive.
Technical support is good.
What needs improvement?
I cannot think of any specific issues we've had.
We'd like an enhancement of legends and labels in the UI. The formatting could be better.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for two years. I haven't used it for too long just yet.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I'd rate the stability eight out of ten. There aren't bugs or glitches that I have noticed. It doesn't crash or freeze. I find it to be reliable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I'd rate the scalability eight out of ten. It can extend well.
We had 50 or more people using it in my previous organization.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is fine. They have been helpful and responsive.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
How was the initial setup?
I'm not sure if it is easy to set up the solution. I did not handle the deployment.
What was our ROI?
I have not looked into the ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is moderate. It is neither too expensive nor overly cheap.
What other advice do I have?
I am using the latest version of the solution.
As a cloud solution, it is very good. Many organizations are going to the cloud, and Grafana is the best way to monitor those cloud environments.
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It is a good solution.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Backend Dev at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Gives the visibility we need, and increases productivity and observability
Pros and Cons
- "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."
- "It's difficult to see the trends on the graph when the range is too long."
What is our primary use case?
We have a few use cases. We have charts for infrastructure, CPU usage, etc. We have included a lot of metrics for WAFs. We also have some customer metrics and business metrics, such as any number of transactions for a specific action happening on the site.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
It's difficult to see the trends on the graph when the range is too long.
For how long have I used the solution?
At the company, they'd been using Grafana since I joined. It has been about three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It has been working fine for us.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
With our workload, it's working fine. Going by that, I'd rate it a 10 out of 10, but I don't know about the other cases.
How are customer service and support?
I've not contacted them.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I don't know if it's the same, but we were using CloudWatch in AWS.
Honeycomb is also similar to this. With all the metrics and performances, you can build dashboards, but I'm new to it.
How was the initial setup?
Our team has two people who are in charge of that, but I'm not aware of its implementation.
What other advice do I have?
I don't have much experience with other tools, but for my specific case, it has been working great. I'd rate it a 10 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Consultant at Tata Consultancy
Great visualization tool, but could have better UI
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
- "Its UI features to create charts can also be improved. Some features could have a link to the documentation."
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
I did not use Grafana that much as it was a built-in application of the company I worked at.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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