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Open-source solutions work adequately but future AI enhancements and advanced tracing capabilities are desired
What is our primary use case?
We actually work with BMC and similar solutions, and while I wouldn't say that they are the same as a full, fully-fledged APM, we're working our way up using open source and everything, so I don't know how far we'll get with that. We're a government agency, and although these costly tools are very efficient and useful, it's hard for me to convince the organization about that, especially since we're not allowed to use public cloud solutions, so we have an on-prem solution, which makes us a demanding customer.We use BMC Helix with the AIOps solution, and while all of these are public domain knowledge because we have to be open with how we procure and purchase our services, I am not the one who would purchase such a system. I would be the customer to it and someone else would host it, while I work more with observability, such as the Grafana stack and the cloud-native solutions.We're working with Grafana more actively now for maybe a couple of years, and we are looking at Tempo and the tracing solutions to see if it will scale. We have metrics back-ends and everything, and we're basically late-stage discovery, early-stage implementation at large scale, with 1,400 people in our tech organization and a 14,000 people organization, where the technology side is just 10%.We get alerts from the alerting tools, and we act on them. I'm looking now at logs, Grafana, trace profiles, and while we're not yet into AI/ML and root-cause analysis, we do focus on alerting and, to some extent, plugins and app observability, mainly utilizing the basics for now.
What is most valuable?
We use Tempo for tracing and, of course, alerting and monitoring metrics. We've tested some features but we're only using a few of them actually, so I can't provide the full range of what different tools Grafana offers as an open-source project, but it's definitely useful for monitoring, alerting, logs, and analysis.Grafana integrates with some of the tools we've chosen beforehand, and while I'm not the right person to elaborate on this since I'm more focused on managing big teams, the teams working with it seem happy. We used to have performance issues, which could be due to running it in an OpenShift environment, but functionality-wise, it seems to be useful, albeit not offering the same power tools as APM such as AppDynamics.
What needs improvement?
The whole AI capability would be useful for Grafana in the future, and while I don't think we're mature yet, I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following different requests between different services could be more powerful.
For how long have I used the solution?
Depending on how you define use, whether it's in production or just dabbling with it, I would say that using it actively with a subset of the team has been for maybe two years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
You have to scale horizontally to deal with issues.
How are customer service and support?
We might have gotten help from technical support, but I'm not sure how much since I haven't seen an invoice for purchasing support, so it's probably community open-source style.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
What other advice do I have?
I would probably recommend Grafana for monitoring and analytics tasks, but since I haven't really pushed it to the limits from a non-functional perspective, I would hesitate if someone from a high-scale Telco environment asked for my recommendation.I rate Grafana a six out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
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