TrustRadius Insights for Grafana are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Grafana has been widely praised by users for its ability to visualize graphs and data collected from millions of customers. It has become an essential tool for a leading set top box provider in Europe. Users have found Grafana particularly valuable in showcasing the impact of real-world conditions on resources, such as changes in system resources during spikes in web traffic. Additionally, Grafana's capability to gather metrics on all infrastructure and app levels in one place has proven beneficial for monitoring microservices. It has successfully addressed the issue of inadequate monitoring and alerting capabilities in AWS Cloudwatch by providing customizable graphs and alerts. The ability to offer custom PostgreSQL graphing dashboards has also enhanced monitoring options for customers. Grafana's quick and effective visualization of critical systems' status and usage, both on premises and in the cloud, enables faster issue response.
For visibility into application monitoring and alerting (both frontend and backend), as well as AWS service monitoring and alerting, Grafana is excellent for real-time metric statistics and integrates seamlessly with the TIG stack. We are a B2C product, and for all issues related to debugging and alerting, Grafana is working like a charm and significantly reducing the turnaround time (TAT) during crises
Pros
Monitoring of both frontend and backend application
Alerting of critial issues
Stats monitoring for product
Cons
Alerting of baseline in case of deviate baseline
Lack of data transformation
nil
Likelihood to Recommend
For visibility into application monitoring and alerting (both frontend and backend), as well as AWS service monitoring and alerting, Grafana is excellent for real-time metric statistics and integrates seamlessly with the TIG stack. We are a B2C product, and for all issues related to debugging and alerting, Grafana is working like a charm and significantly reducing the turnaround time (TAT) during crises
Grafana is a great tool for us as a single pane of glass for all Data Sources that generate metrics. We have created wonderful dashboards and graphs around application health, response time, error rates, error and access codes, and so on. Outside of tech specific insights, it can be used to generate a UI for many different non-technical areas, such as sales data, metrics, and trending.
The amount of plugins available to Grafana either directly or indirectly, allows unlimited flexibility in Data visualization.
Pros
Data Visualization
Graphing
Alerting
Trending
Cons
Needs more in-depth alerting capabilities
Better anomaly detection
Easier ability to query using a common schema
Likelihood to Recommend
If I was starting over on an Observability platform, Grafana would be my number 1 choice due to the flexibility and ability to act as a single platform either on its own or combining multiple data sources.
The trick however, is that it can be fairly complex to learn and setup, so time is needed to make it a successful implementation. There is a level of cognitive load required.
VU
Verified User
Director in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
We use Grafana to monitor our whole infrastructure of linux servers and node js apps. Since we have brought in the Grafana observability into our organisation, it has saved us in many ways from going apps down to server crashing. We have used its ML feature to learn about he patterns in spikes of our server and apps health. One of the best things that we are grateful for using Grafana is its customer service almost as quickly as one can imagine which get us helps whenever we are in a situation. Grafana's alerting system is another great feature that anyone who uses Grafana knows what I am talking about. Its metrics are accurate, and can be retrieve for last 60 days. I also love how Grafana keeps updating its features. Grafana can be a great choice for anyone who is looking for a better observability platform. I use it almost everyday and there is always something new that you find on Grafana which is going to make your application monitoring better than before. When you sign up for free Grafana Cloud Online, you get unlimited number of dashboards to create, beautiful and informative ones, you get 50 GB of logs and 10 K metrics 50 GB of traces, and in my opinion that is more than enough to experience how effective and amazing a service Grafana is.
Pros
Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
Microservices monitoring
Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
Cons
Documentation needs to be more clarified since it can be confusing for beginners
Notification alert message templates need to be simplified
Likelihood to Recommend
Grafana is a one stop solution for all application monitoring needs. In our organisation, we use nodeJs. We run it using pm2. Since we didn't use Grafana it was hard for us to know if an app has stopped working unless we find it ourselves because our other app components were failing, or someone called us up and told about the situation. We were already using Grafana for monitoring our Ubuntu servers, but we hadn't had set it up for our app monitoring. Somehow we decided to monitor our nodeJs app with Grafana. It's a really good decision we made. We used Grafana nodeJs module "prom-client" for our node app which brought us relief from app failing situations. Since we have implemented Grafana for our Node app, it has helped us to monitor every health aspect of our node app. Now we have set up alerts based on heap-memory, so when heap memory goes beyond a set threshold we get notified and take the right steps ultimately saving our app from crashing and of course from losing business and reputation.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (11-50 employees)
We're using Grafana for visualizing Prometheus metrics which comes from our Kubernetes clusters and other Application and Enterprise tools servers and sending alerts on our collaboration channels whenever a metric is breeching defined threshold. There are a lot of paid tools [that] are available in the market, but nothing is better than Grafana.
Pros
It visualizes metrics very well coming from any well known data source.
It sends alerts to collaboration channels when a threshold is breeched.
Graphs and dashboards are portable (Graph-as-a-Code).
Cons
There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are looking for a tool that can visualize metrics coming from data sources, create widgets, dashboards, and send alerts on collaboration channels when a threshold is breached then in that case Grafana is a GoTo tool; but if you are looking for analyzing logs, Grafana can not do this you will have to with Kibana or any other log analysis tool [in my opinion].
Grafana is being used as part of our monitoring solution alongside services such as Icinga. It is used to graph the uptime as well as sessions etc. This is then exported as part of our monthly review and supplied to clients as part of the billing cycle. It is also used by the support team too with the monitoring solution to spot any trends that could potentially lead to issues in the future.
Pros
Graphing lots of data
Simplicity of setup
Readability of logs
Cons
Configuration plugins
Automation of setups
Custom exports
Likelihood to Recommend
We create monthly availability reports and connection reports for services. Grafana helps break down the information from the logs of the services into easily readable formats to speed up the reporting process.
It is well suited as part of a maintenance and support suite for teams that manage multiple servers or applications. That is the case with us. It helps with noticing trends for systems, such as high usage times, etc. However when combined with alerting services, it can also warn of a potential issue before it occurs.
My company started using it for just a single department, the systems engineering team. We have now built it out where it benefits other departments, so it is used by a large percentage of Operations. Grafana helps to visualize metrics so we have a better idea of what is happening within our environment and areas of improvement.
Pros
Stunning dashboards
Versatile data sources
Cons
Functions to customize values
Improved user experience
Likelihood to Recommend
We use the free version of Grafana and it handles everything we need for now, we will likely be switching to the paid version at some point. Grafana also offers a hosted instance that helps users get off the ground sooner. There is a definite learning curve to creating dashboards and knowing data sources available to the user.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
Grafana imis a tool like many others but one of the most flexible and widely used tools. Solvable business problems using this include visualization of ticket and incident data. Observability of server processes and services from just about any platform.
Scope of use includes showing the SLOs and SLIs for infrastructure and business organizations. Team metrics. And data can be connected to MS teams to grab data through automation and workflows.
Pros
Metrics
Time visualization
Graphs
Data sorting
Data visualization.
Cons
Integrations
Load times
Configuration
Likelihood to Recommend
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well.
Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation.
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)