Comprehensive Monitoring Made Easy with Grafana
What do you like best about the product?
Grafana provides a clear overview of errors in our application, displays pod statuses, and helps us monitor the behavior of our HTTP server using OpenTelemetry. Additionally, the wide range of available plugins further enhances the overall experience.
What do you dislike about the product?
The user interface can be challenging to navigate at first, and the overall setup process is quite difficult, especially if you are not very tech-savvy.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Grafana provides us with valuable insights into the health of our application. Each morning, we review it to identify any potential issues or unusual patterns in our app's behavior.
Powerful, Flexible, and Community-Driven Observability Platform
What do you like best about the product?
What I appreciate most about Grafana Labs is its robust open-source foundation, paired with a dedicated focus on addressing real-world observability challenges. The products offer both power and flexibility, while the community-driven approach fosters ongoing innovation. Additionally, the company culture stands out for its emphasis on transparency, continuous learning, and making a meaningful impact for customers.
What do you dislike about the product?
The platform may seem complicated to newcomers, as there is a noticeable learning curve when it comes to setup and more advanced configurations. Additionally, certain features demand a higher level of technical expertise, which can make it harder for teams without a strong technical background to adopt the platform quickly.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Grafana Labs addresses the challenge of limited visibility in complex systems by unifying metrics, logs, and traces within a single observability platform. This integration allows me to identify issues more quickly, gain real-time insights into system behavior, and minimize downtime, which in turn enhances both reliability and my confidence in operations.
Robust Monitoring with Room for Improvement
What do you like best about the product?
I like the features in Grafana Labs for monitoring alerts in the dashboard and initiating the issue with our leadership team. The real-time visibility into system health, security events, and operational anomalies through monitoring alerts in a centralized dashboard is excellent. This proactive approach allows potential issues to be detected early, often before they escalate into service disruptions or security incidents. The initial setup was relatively straightforward, and the process of installing, integrating with data sources, and creating basic dashboards was easy with the help of the available documentation.
What do you dislike about the product?
While Grafana Labs is a powerful and flexible observability platform, there are a few areas where improvements could enhance usability and operational efficiency: Dashboard performance with large data sets, plugin compatibility and maintenance, and alerting configuration complexity.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use Grafana Labs for monitoring GCP platform resources. It helps by sending alerts during peak time, offering real-time visibility, detecting potential issues early, and preventing service disruptions.
Powerful Network Monitoring with Customizable Dashboards
What do you like best about the product?
I love the graphical user interface (GUI) of Grafana Labs, which is beneficial for both end users and management teams. I find the dashboard designs to be outstanding and appreciate the customizable visualizations that make data interpretation more intuitive. The dynamic filtering and variables allow for flexible data interaction, making it easier to tailor the experience to specific needs. Additionally, the alert configuration via the GUI enhances usability and responsiveness. Overall, the setup process of Grafana Labs was impressive and less time-consuming than expected, taking around six months to integrate with the entire network effectively.
What do you dislike about the product?
I find the alerting capabilities of Grafana Labs limiting. Although the alerts are powerful, crafting advanced alert logic often requires proficiency in PromQL or the use of custom queries. This complexity can be challenging for those who do not have a developer background, making it difficult to fully utilize the alerting features without specialized knowledge.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use Grafana Labs for real-time network security monitoring, which solves lack of visibility, delayed incident detection, and manual reporting issues. It offers customizable dashboards and alerting, improving my response time and efficiency.
Powerful Monitoring Tool
What do you like best about the product?
Ability to monitor server resource capacity and performance. Ability to review database performance and configuration. Dashboard and alerting capabilities.
What do you dislike about the product?
Difficulty in overall configuration and setup.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Provide proactive visibility into database and server resources.
Efficient solution to track application logs and status
What do you like best about the product?
Grafana is our go-to tool for monitoring application logs and errors, both during development and in live production environments. It is straightforward to use and was simple to implement, thanks to its seamless integration with the tools connected to our application backend. We rely on it daily to identify errors that aren't apparent from the frontend.
What do you dislike about the product?
Limited features and filtering capabilities but still enough.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It alerts us when there are errors and issues and performance related incidents and lets us focus on solving them.
Has provided real-time views and integrated insights across diverse data sources
What is our primary use case?
I am using it myself. My specialty is application performance monitoring, but when I'm putting systems monitoring in place for the backend, Grafana is the best solution for views and dashboards.
I have utilized Grafana's integration capabilities with Prometheus. In a previous role, we displayed some data with Elasticsearch. I have used it heavily with Zabbix integration as well. I have done Nagios in the past. It depends on the toolset that the customer has, but Grafana is very appealing because the business appreciates the views that come out of Grafana as it gives them the views they want.
I have employed real-time metric visualization capabilities. That's basically what monitoring is - a real-time view. I build up these dashboards or real-time views, but they can also be used as historical views, pulling out more data.
Grafana's role-based access control and multi-tenancy features are important for my organization. At the moment, most of our Grafana is on-premises, but we're looking at cloud options as well. Multi-tenancy is quite important because we have customers that will only want to see their information and not any other. They're not allowed to see some of the other data that we collect, so it's important to have a multi-tenant system.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is Grafana's ability to plug in data or events and monitoring data from any kind of source. The graphing capability is what I use the most.
I have made use of Grafana's customizable dashboards and templating features. These features have enhanced my data visualization and analytical processes by enabling me to give real-time views to our end-users of what they're doing or what their service is doing. The historical and trend data allow people to pull up data from Grafana and from whatever source to display it and examine how an environment is being used.
I have employed real-time metric visualization capabilities for monitoring and real-time views. These dashboards can also be used as historical views, pulling out more data.
The effectiveness of Grafana in delivering real-time notifications through its alerting system is quite good. The widgets are able to highlight errors if they happen in real-time on the dashboard. The alerting functionality is improving. I generally tend to use the monitoring tool for alerting rather than Grafana, but I have had to use Grafana occasionally without any issues.
What needs improvement?
Grafana could be improved through enhancement of graphs and visualizations and providing more integrations. Grafana is going to start working with OpenTelemetry, which would be helpful to have the same sort of design across all different platforms.
I would appreciate additional features in the next release to make it closer to a perfect score. Improved templates would be beneficial in some aspects. Some of the older templates that I used to be able to get in Grafana are only available with a license.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Grafana for about five or six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product has been stable. I have never really had any major issues. There have been times when the integrations don't work as smoothly, but that's usually a configuration issue, not the tool itself.
How are customer service and support?
I usually solve problems by myself. I very rarely get in touch with technical support as we don't have that option.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I used the built-in graphing from the tools themselves before Grafana. I have pushed some data into Power BI as well in the past. I have used various displays, mainly just whatever the platform provides, such as Nagios dashboards, Zabbix dashboards, or SCOM. It depends on what monitoring tool the customer has.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup for Grafana was very straightforward. I followed along and did some design work. I had to calculate the database size and figure out requirements, but beyond that, it's not difficult to install at all.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I did not evaluate other options before choosing Grafana for graphing. Grafana seemed the logical choice. There aren't many other platforms that offer the kind of flexibility and number of integrations that Grafana does. They are quite niche in the graphing and dashboarding space.
What other advice do I have?
I find the pricing of Grafana to be reasonable. I have only ever used the free tier of Grafana, so I cannot comment on the pricing model itself.
Based on my experience, I would recommend Grafana to others.
I rate Grafana an 8 out of 10.
Grafana turns our Android app metrics into actionable insights
What do you like best about the product?
Grafana saved us during Black Friday. Set up a dashboard showing API response times next to our test results - immediately saw why checkout tests were timing out (backend was taking 8 seconds to respond during flash sales).
The Slack alerts are noisy but worth it. Got pinged at 3am once when deployment broke prod - crash rate jumped to 12%.
What do you dislike about the product?
Initial setup with Prometheus was a headache. Some visualizations lag with large datasets. Panel arrangements break on different screen sizes.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We need to know if the app actually performs well in production, Grafana shows me real-time data like API latency, memory usage, and crash rates while our tests run. We noticed our search API taking 3x longer during test runs, which explained the flaky test failures. Now we schedule heavy test suites during off-peak hours based on Grafana metrics, improving our test reliability.
Grafana Labs
What do you like best about the product?
open-source-first approach and its ability to unify data from diverse sources, offering a single pane of glass for observability.
What do you dislike about the product?
nothing from me, users first give a try it is open source and easy to integrate
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
so, we wanted to configure alerts and post our research grafana labs fits our requirement since then we integrated it with slack and then created a slack channel , added people and this way it solved our problem.
Community support and visualization features impress but integration guides could simplify
What is our primary use case?
For my personal usage, I do use Grafana, and it does make life easier for solving stuff.
What is most valuable?
The main benefits I have seen from using Grafana in my day-to-day activities is the visualization of the metrics, specifically Dora Metrics. Instead of saying 'I feel the team is developing bad or slow,' you can actually have metrics to support that. You can actually show that this team could work better here, in this case, or needs to focus more on peer reviews or on deployments. The visualization of the data is key.
What needs improvement?
For my personal usage of Grafana, I think there could be improvements, particularly that I use the Grafana Cloud SAS solution. The integration guides could be simpler and easier.
Regarding the clarity of the official documentation for installation, I think the official documentation, which has something called Alloy, the Alloy integration, is not that clear. It was mostly for personal usage that I'm talking about right now.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Grafana for around a year, maybe more.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Grafana is stable; however, in the previous company, we also had Grafana for a long period of time, and its stability depends on the load. Once you get to a higher load, you need to re-evaluate your architecture and put that into account.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time, which indicated a bottleneck that we had to address by updating the infrastructure.
How are customer service and support?
I'm not familiar with Grafana's feature in terms of community and documentation since I've been here only a few months. The community provides extensive knowledge about Grafana. You will get faster answers about Grafana than about Datadog from the community.
My advice for people who are new to Grafana or considering it is to reach out to the community mainly, as that's the primary benefit of Grafana.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The reasons for moving from Grafana to Datadog include the fact that Datadog is a SAS solution, and we don't need to manage it. I was told, and as I mentioned I'm kind of new, there was already Datadog running, so it's not creating a new one but just moving the data. The main benefit of Datadog versus Grafana is the ease of creating a dashboard, which is just simple for the user.
What about the implementation team?
In the previous company, about three or four people worked on Grafana implementation. It was an ongoing effort that took several months to complete.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Grafana is easier to sell to management compared to Datadog and other solutions because it has an open-source tier, which makes it easier.
If I'm coming as a personal user, then Grafana is the best solution out there right now. But if we're looking at it as an enterprise, then when money is less of an issue, Datadog is much easier to use and implement than Grafana.
What other advice do I have?
Managing and maintaining Grafana is kind of managing another application; as far as Grafana itself, you don't have much to do. It's mostly about the infrastructure, resources, and if you're deploying it in high availability, maybe more instances. So it's mostly infrastructure work and less about Grafana itself.
I rate Grafana an eight out of ten.
