Grafana Reviews

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. 

We use it internally to monitor both hardware and virtual machines running on our servers and then generate reports based on the monitoring data.

One standout feature is its open-source nature. It excels in providing comprehensive details when there are downtimes or fluctuations, offering thorough reports. From a cost perspective, it stands out positively, especially when compared to other tools, given its robust functionality as an open-source solution.

There is a need for improvement in automating daily monitoring reports, especially when alerts are triggered due to system downtimes or fluctuations. This enhancement would make the monitoring tool more efficient and streamlined. While it does produce reports, the quality might not be optimal.

I have approximately two years of experience working with it.

I haven't encountered any issues or bugs while using it, and it has been stable throughout.

Numerous users, ranging from five hundred to a maximum of three hundred, frequently engage in upscaling and downscaling activities. The system handles this well, and the performance remains stable, even when multiple users log in and out simultaneously.

The initial setup is not overly complicated nor excessively straightforward. It's a manageable process that involves following a step-by-step approach.

It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool.

It is recommended for use, and in parallel, WebEx is another open-source tool. Both are straightforward to deploy on a Linux server. The process is simple and similar to each other, and there's no need for any complex procedures. Deploying these monitoring tools on a Linux server is hassle-free. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

Our team used a Grafana for training.

The comparison feature is very good. 

The service dashboard is very hard and needs improvement. 

I have been using Grafana for six to seven years. 

It is a stable solution. 

The solution was deployed with Kubernetes. The deployment took an hour to complete. It is not difficult to maintain as Kubernetes gives easy updates. 

I am using the open source version. 

I rate the overall 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.

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.

The solution is used for monitoring the live monitoring of our load test.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data.

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.

I have been using the solution for over three years.

We currently have over 50 people using the solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment usually takes one and a half hours.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

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 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.