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.
dynamic dashboard creation tool. provides graphics to the data.
What do you like best about the product?
creating reports and dashboards for clients or stakeholders that represents the data we work on
What do you dislike about the product?
errors while creating queries for dashboard are difficult to understand
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
creating charts and dynamic dashboards which are easy to understand
Grafana - Great visualization application / tool for Monitoring and Reports
What do you like best about the product?
The updated colorful and meaningful graphs and charts are excellent, and with the great visualizations in the panels and the much-required metrics and other good features they provide.
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing more, but the alerting options are not available for Instana, and some other data sources is a drawback which I feel.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are using Grafana for the Instana data source. We benefit from the dashboards we customize based on our application, Server, and website monitoring purposes. Also, we have integrated AWS cloud watch with Grafana for better monitoring.
We use Grafana to generate graphical reports for monthly and weekly tenure and can be shared,
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Perfect monitoring tool with great visualizations inbuilt, also easy to configure good dashboards based on our requirements.
Grafana - Cross platform solution for dashboarding
What do you like best about the product?
The Grafana is equipped with very lightweight dashboard pages.
It does not lag a little.
The graphs are very much interactive with the user.
we have the possibility to draw more than one pens in a single chart, which most of the software don't support.
The colouring is very much versatile for the graphs.
What do you dislike about the product?
It does not have connectivity with all of the databases in the market. That is okay because it supports connectivity with most of the databases.
It does not have the automatic report generation facility, that could have been introduced so that we can have automated reporting for our customers.
It also could have a one or two communication drivers to talk with device directly.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Connectivity with InfluxDB and SQL server.
querying the data from the database .
Dash boarding the data in a webbrowser.
Recommended
What do you like best about the product?
It's is easy to monitor the connectivity logs in daily basis
What do you dislike about the product?
I haven't started using indepth so for now nothing dislike
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
If the UI is improve bit easier that would be great
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If your company needs the monitoring tool to use in daily basis then I will recommend this.
Using Grafana for visualizing Metrics and Logs in our DevOps environment
What do you like best about the product?
That grafana is easy to integrate with every kind of data source. The graphs are smooth and easy to understand. You can easily query everything.
What do you dislike about the product?
Displaying logs is a bit unsupported at the moment, but still one of the best on the market.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Visualizing metrics of our virtual machines from elasticsearch datasource and visualizing metrics of containers from prometheus datasource. Also displaying application and server logs on separated dashboards. The biggest benefit is that I can see every kind of information from various datasources on a single platform and possibly on a single dashboard. The dashboards are capable of refreshing themselves and with that, you can see what is happening in you environment real time. Grafana is also great if you want to display one or more of its dashboards on TV screens or on some other non-interactive display, because you can share the dashboards for users who does not have the needed privileges to sign in to your grafana instance. Integration of grafana with any kind of authentication system (for example Microsoft's very own Active Directory with the LDAP integration) is very easy. Running grafana inside container is also very easy and well documented and supported, which makes the operation of the instance a lot easier. You can also create organizations on the platform and you can create roles based on those organizations. By using these, you can separate dashboards for different teams and/or users. The documentation and the community built around the platform is great and one of the best I have seen in the open source community.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you need to choose one platform, where you can visualize metrics, don't hesitate and just choose grafana, because it is the best platform for it.
I used grafana for visulization purpose.
What do you like best about the product?
Grafana is basically used for visualization purpose. It provides different types of panels for visualizing data for example graph, status panel, single state etc.
we can use different type of data sources while creating any dashboard.
What do you dislike about the product?
Till now everything is fine, I personally feels good while using it.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
For monitoring different type of tools and for presenting our data in the form of graphs I mainly use grafana.
Best visualisation tool for monitoring
What do you like best about the product?
Customisation of graphs, a lot of data sources, a lot of plugins (different visualisations, auth, data sources). Multi-tenancy, different auth methods. Sharing of graphs. API for automation and etc.
What do you dislike about the product?
If you use it heavily sometimes you need to modify code to add more features (and in my experience only 30% of github PR got merged). Some obvious features for visualisation plugins are still missing (like filter out empty metrics from table).
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Visualisation, alerts, monitoring, troubleshooting.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Use internal alerts if you use cases are simple otherwise use some external and more powerful tool. Don't be lazy and set up proper auth.
Also remember that your Grafana powerfulness depends on your time series database. Nice would be to ideas is to use templating tool to build your graphs.
Grafana Visualizes Environment Data
What do you like best about the product?
Grafana has allowed us to visualize data we were not collecting prior. From simple statistics such as temperature and humidity of our datacenters, to performance metrics of a variety of production servers, we can now not only have an easy-to-digest snapshot of where our environment stands, but forecast where we need to be to maintain a desired level of performance for a growing userbase.
What do you dislike about the product?
Grafana can take some finesse to visualize data in a desirable fashion. Although there is a large breadth of information that it can digest and display in a visually appealing way, it can take a bit of massaging to showcase the data in the way that is wanted.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We went from using real-time monitoring such as Windows Performance metrics to wall thermostats in our datacenters to have any idea of where we stood with our hardware and physical environments, to being able to view historical trends and forecast new equipment purchases. There is obvious value in being pro-active in these regards, as opposed to reactive.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Start with simple dashboards showing correlations with only 1 or 2 data points; once more data is being processed it's easy to dive deep into data displays that you didn't even know you could showcase, let alone would want to. We've gone from wanting simple measurements of the temperatures of our datacenters to collecting performance metrics on almost all production servers, usage rates of UPS devices, and network traffic flows from various devices across our network.
Great Graphics, Great Insights
What do you like best about the product?
Grafana allows us to tap into our databases and visualize information in an easy to digest way, perfect for non-technical staff.
What do you dislike about the product?
Because it taps into our databases, it's necessary to use some sort of coding experience to gather the information, so the setup is not easy for non-tech personnel.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are gathering user metrics from our internal databases to gather better insights from our users to improve our products, and with grafana we have gained a better understanding of how people are using our product.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Implement this software with a technical staff help, otherwise you won't be able to tap into its full potential.
