Grafana Reviews

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.

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.

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. 

We primarily use the solution for site visibility.

It helps us monitor our applications and their performance, including CPU.

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. 

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. 

I've been using the solution for two years. I haven't used it for too long just yet. 

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. 

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. 

Technical support is fine. They have been helpful and responsive. 

Positive

I'm not sure if it is easy to set up the solution. I did not handle the deployment. 

I have not looked into the ROI.

The pricing is moderate. It is neither too expensive nor overly cheap. 

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. 

We primarily use the solution as a dashboard and visualization tool for our business units.

Grafana is able to connect with multiple data sources, unlike Elasticsearch.

There is room for improvement when using multiple dashboards because they can become complicated to keep track of and use.

I would like to have alerting functions added to the solution.

I have been using the solution for seven years.

The solution is stable.

We previously used Pearl and PHP but they were outdated.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We are using the open-source license.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

The solution requires one day a week for maintenance.

We have 200 people using the solution in our organization.

We built a web service around Prometheus and Grafana and control them through the web API, which is very helpful with deployment.

Our primary use case is for insight on CPU, what's happening in namespaces and nodes.

We like the features, it's a basic dashboard.

I'd like to see more in-depth graphs and more AI, alerting and log aggregation.

We've used this solution for two years. 

The solution is stable if you use it separate to Rancher. 

Scalability could be improved. 

Deployment is straightforward and takes a few minutes. It comes with Rancher so you can spin it up quickly. 

We're using the open-source version. 

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.

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 three years

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.