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.

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.

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.

I have been using Grafana for three to four years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost.

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.

We use Grafana as an APM solution to monitor the performance of our serverless core, like, doctors and containers.

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.

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.

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

I have been using Grafana for three years.

We've never had an outage with Grafana, and its stability is very nice.

Around 25 to 30 people are using Grafana in our organization.

Before using Grafana, we previously used different solutions like PRTG and OpenNMS.

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.

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.

We use the solution for login and creating dashboards.

The solution provides good integration and accurate application metrics.

The solution's interface could be more accessible.

We have been using the solution for three years.

I refer to the solution's online documentation in case of technical errors.

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.

The solution is expensive. Although, its price depends on infrastructure.

I rate the solution a nine.

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.