In my company, we regularly use it to monitor the status of our running reports, CPU usage, memory applications, and other relevant metrics.
External reviews
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Easy to set up monitoring solution that could improve its end-point monitoring
What is our primary use case?
What needs improvement?
The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring. Due to this requirement, we faced challenges in fetching details related to endpoint monitoring. We are considering the implementation of better tools.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for the past two and a half years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have around 20 to 30 people using the solution in my company.
How are customer service and support?
I’m not involved with contacting customer service.
How was the initial setup?
The installation process is easy. We have deployed it on the cloud.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.
An open-source analytics and monitoring platform that excels in flexible data visualization and diverse data source integration, but may require improvement in automating daily reports
What is our primary use case?
We use it internally to monitor both hardware and virtual machines running on our servers and then generate reports based on the monitoring data.
What is most valuable?
One standout feature is its open-source nature. It excels in providing comprehensive details when there are downtimes or fluctuations, offering thorough reports. From a cost perspective, it stands out positively, especially when compared to other tools, given its robust functionality as an open-source solution.
What needs improvement?
There is a need for improvement in automating daily monitoring reports, especially when alerts are triggered due to system downtimes or fluctuations. This enhancement would make the monitoring tool more efficient and streamlined. While it does produce reports, the quality might not be optimal.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have approximately two years of experience working with it.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I haven't encountered any issues or bugs while using it, and it has been stable throughout.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Numerous users, ranging from five hundred to a maximum of three hundred, frequently engage in upscaling and downscaling activities. The system handles this well, and the performance remains stable, even when multiple users log in and out simultaneously.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is not overly complicated nor excessively straightforward. It's a manageable process that involves following a step-by-step approach.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool.
What other advice do I have?
It is recommended for use, and in parallel, WebEx is another open-source tool. Both are straightforward to deploy on a Linux server. The process is simple and similar to each other, and there's no need for any complex procedures. Deploying these monitoring tools on a Linux server is hassle-free. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
A stable solution that enables seamless visualization and movement of data between teams
How has it helped my organization?
Our team used a Grafana for training.
What is most valuable?
The comparison feature is very good.
What needs improvement?
The service dashboard is very hard and needs improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Grafana for six to seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a stable solution.
How was the initial setup?
The solution was deployed with Kubernetes. The deployment took an hour to complete. It is not difficult to maintain as Kubernetes gives easy updates.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I am using the open source version.
What other advice do I have?
I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Good dashboard features and provides excellent customization
What is our primary use case?
My main use case is the dashboard. For example, we have screens created in the last step, and we integrate Grafana with that so that we can see the dashboards with the data. What does the traffic look like? What do the errors look like? So the is our main use case.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable aspect is customization. There are many customizations possible, so I like that.
What needs improvement?
There is room for improvement in terms of stability.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Grafana for more than a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the stability an eight out of ten because sometimes I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have never had any issues with scalability.
Everyone in our organization uses this solution. So, we have over 10,000 end users.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. You simply see what you want to do. You want to add a row. You want to add a panel. So it's easy for me to set it up.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
A good solution to track all the servers and platforms, but it needs to improve its configuration part
What is our primary use case?
I copied it on my primary server. I use it to monitor servers. I would say it is a good solution to track all the servers and platforms, specifically the technical platforms.
What is most valuable?
Grafana has such features that it need not exist on other products.
What needs improvement?
I had issues with the solution's configuration part. Though I resolved it, the configuration is an area needing improvement since it is the solution's only problem.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have experience using Grafana. I am a new user of the tool.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven and a half out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Grafana is a very scalable product. It's a really good product.
I know many people who use Grafana to monitor SuccessFactors.
How was the initial setup?
The setup is not very easy or difficult, so it is in the middle because I faced an issue with it the first time, but the next time, I will configure it and make it work properly and in the correct manner.
What other advice do I have?
To those planning to use the solution, I would say that they need to add the system administrator to use and install Grafana as a monitoring tool to check servers and platforms. It's a good solution to monitor all the platforms.
I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
An open-source solution used to build custom dashboards
What is our primary use case?
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.
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.
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.
Customizable, flexible, open source dashboarding tool supporting a lot of data sources
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for more than three years
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
We haven't bought technical support and haven't dealt with their customer service agents.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We considered Kibana before we chose this solution.
What other advice do I have?
The solution is great and is one of the best in the market for visualization.