Grafana Enterprise

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.

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.

What do you like best about the product?

Grafana makes it really easy to visualize metrics and logs from different sources in one place. I like how flexible it is you can connect Prometheus, Loki, and even cloud services without much hassle. The dashboards look clean, and you can customize them quite a bit. I also appreciate the alerting features and the fact that the open-source version still gives you a lot of power. Their documentation and community are also great when you need help

What do you dislike about the product?

Some of the more advanced features can be hard to figure out at first, especially if you're new to observability tools. Managing a lot of dashboards can get tricky unless you're very organized from the start. Also, some useful features like team management and reporting are only available in the paid plans, which might be a limitation for smaller teams or personal projects.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Grafana helps us bring together data from various sources logs, metrics, traces—and makes it easier to monitor everything in one place. This has saved us a lot of time during incident investigations, as we no longer need to jump between different tools. The real-time alerting and visualization capabilities help us detect and fix issues faster, which directly improves system reliability and reduces downtime.

What do you like best about the product?

Grafana offers a highly intuitive and flexible interface for building very interactive dashboards. It supports a wide range of data sources, including Prometheus, Azure Monitor, and more, which makes integration seamless

What do you dislike about the product?

While Grafana is excellent overall, managing permissions and fine-tuning user access across multiple dashboards can require some initial configuration. Additionally, creating very complex queries may have a learning curve depending on the connected data source

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Grafana solves the challenge of bringing together data from diverse sources into a single, coherent view. It simplifies monitoring of dynamic environments like containers and cloud infrastructure, while also enabling real-time alerting and log correlation. This reduces downtime, and empowers teams to make data-driven decisions more effectively.

For my personal usage, I do use Grafana , and it does make life easier for solving stuff.

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.

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.

I have been using Grafana for around a year, maybe more.

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.

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.

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.

Positive

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.

In the previous company, about three or four people worked on Grafana implementation. It was an ongoing effort that took several months to complete.

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.

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.

Public Cloud

Other