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.
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An open-source solution used to build custom dashboards
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Grafana for three to four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Grafana Observability Tool
What do you like best about the product?
It's provides a great monitoring system with huge scalability and customisation with the requirements of business where we can design our own dashboard
What do you dislike about the product?
As I have been using the monitoring tool grafana as a one stop place for our complete infrastructure hence I am unable to find any specific dislike but I feel being a open source tool it just has certain limitations.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It's provided a great insight of our infrastructure helping us with great visibility and observations in the system and helping us diagnose the system if and when required with minimal effort
Powerful Time Series Visualization Tool with steep learning curve for beginners.
What do you like best about the product?
The ease of building time series visualizations is fantastic. The choice of visuals available is quite comprehensive as well. However, other tools are available in the market with a cleaner interface and better response time.
What do you dislike about the product?
The query-based interface to generate charts is very old school and primitive. Drag and drop interfaces are available in every BI tool, and the majority are shifting to Natural Language query semantics.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Lack of Business Intelligence Tools which focus on time series data series. I used PromQL and GraphDB to create dashboards in Grafana.
Best open source tool for infra monitoring
What do you like best about the product?
We use grafana paired with prometheus for infra monitoring, it provides a very intuitive visualizations with graphs on time series data such as memory utilisation, cpu consumption. Grafana's feature to allow alert setup and integrations with pagerduty and splunk oncall really easy to use.
What do you dislike about the product?
There are some bugs in Grafana, so not as refined as paid software like Newrelic. One more issue is that it doesn't provide alerting history if we want to review at the end of the week, so we had to rely on splunk for a report.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Data visualisation platforms are extremely pricey, but opensource tools like grafana paired with Promethues work wonders for small companies. Since we can host grafana on our servers we can keep sensitive data private.
Helps to monitor the performance of serverless core, like, doctors and containers
What is our primary use case?
We use Grafana as an APM solution to monitor the performance of our serverless core, like, doctors and containers.
How has it helped my organization?
Grafana is a very important tool or product that helps us receive information like alarms, performance, KPIs, and metrics. So Grafana is an important part of our business that helps us to make decisions and plan for business improvement.
What is most valuable?
The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability. Currently, we use the CEMA format to classify alarms according to the callers. For instance, critical alarms are displayed in red, warnings in yellow, and announcement alarms in green. We use Grafana for the formatting of alarms.
What needs improvement?
The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk. Some functionalities are unavailable for us since we use the AWS-managed version of Grafana
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Grafana for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We've never had an outage with Grafana, and its stability is very nice.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Around 25 to 30 people are using Grafana in our organization.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before using Grafana, we previously used different solutions like PRTG and OpenNMS.
How was the initial setup?
I tried installing Grafana long ago, but it was very hard. Beginners will find that installing Grafana is not as simple as other solutions. You need to have the intermediate or medium-level experience to install Grafana.
What other advice do I have?
Grafana's usability depends on your perspective and function. In my current job, Grafan helps us with serverless solutions. However, Grafana cannot be helpful in monitoring, networking, and interfacing for routers.
My advice to new users of Grafana is to have nice documentation and a good knowledge base before performing tasks like installation or configuration.
Overall, I rate Grafana an eight out of ten.
Provides good integration and generates application metrics efficiently
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution for login and creating dashboards.
What is most valuable?
The solution provides good integration and accurate application metrics.
What needs improvement?
The solution's interface could be more accessible.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using the solution for three years.
How are customer service and support?
I refer to the solution's online documentation in case of technical errors.
How was the initial setup?
The solution's initial setup process is complicated. Its complexity depends on the use cases. Also, as it is self-hosted on Grafana cloud, it requires minimum maintenance.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution is expensive. Although, its price depends on infrastructure.
What other advice do I have?
I rate the solution a nine.
Excellent tool for monitoring and error debugging
What do you like best about the product?
1. Easy to integrate with current workflow
2. Easy search features which help non-tech users to find logs
3. In multi-container environment, search can be deepened further for logs
2. Easy search features which help non-tech users to find logs
3. In multi-container environment, search can be deepened further for logs
What do you dislike about the product?
I was not easily able to filter warnings vs errors in logs. I think they should provide quick search functionality for errors or warnings as well
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
1. Easy container monitoring
2. We are able to catch errors before they hit production
3. Not that much costly
2. We are able to catch errors before they hit production
3. Not that much costly
Gain exceptional visuals and insights with Grafana
What do you like best about the product?
I'm most impressed with how Grafana allows us to visualize and understand complex relationships between data that were previously difficult to see. The detailed analytics generated by the platform allow us to anticipate our needs for an optimal user experience, such as monitoring server performance levels or tracking temperature and humidity in a data center environment. By using these graphical representations of information, we can easily determine appropriate action plans to ensure the successful operation of any application landscape.
What do you dislike about the product?
I dislike that Grafana's edit mode is inferior to its query mode, making it difficult for users unfamiliar with SQL to modify databases and graphs. A necessary improvement would be a more user-friendly editing interface so that non-expert users can make their own changes without having to ask someone else for help in writing the necessary query.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I'm benefiting from using Grafana because I can monitor and analyze the data collected by my various IoT sensors in real time. And thanks to its intuitive interface, setting up graphs with different configurations is just a click away.
The best visualization tool
What do you like best about the product?
It is Open Source.
It is very flexible and allows you to show and analyze data from several sources.
It is very flexible and allows you to show and analyze data from several sources.
What do you dislike about the product?
Features that are not available in the Open Source version.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I'm using Grafana in IoT systems for displaying sensor data.
Free, Powerful and customizable
What do you like best about the product?
The possibility of monitoring everything aspect of your CPU, firewall network, container and VPS or other. For server maintenance or to understand an application's traffic (my case) is a beneficial tool.
What do you dislike about the product?
Grafana doesn't work in real-time. The customization is an infinite possibility, but Grafana should provide some default equations for us. Also, you need to understand a bit more about how to config Prometheus and Node Exporter.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Grafana helps us to monitor the stress of our apps and local servers.
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