Unified dashboards have empowered teams and have democratized real-time operational insights
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Grafana involves operational dashboarding and data visualization, where I use it as a central pane of glass to pull in metrics from multiple sources like Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and SQL databases to visualize the overall health of our systems in one unified view.
For example, I have built a NOC dashboard that tracks CPU memory usage and network traffic across all the pods. If a specific service starts failing, the Grafana dashboard highlights the issue in red, allowing my on-call engineers to identify the failing cluster at a glance.
What is most valuable?
Grafana's snapshot and dashboard sharing features are critical for our remote incident response. During production issues, I generate a public snapshot of a dashboard at a specific point and share the URL in our Slack war room so every engineer can see exactly what the metrics looked like when the error occurred. This helps significantly during the process of finding the root cause in those scenarios.
The best features Grafana offers go beyond just pretty charts; it is an integration engine. The fact that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table is a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere.
My team uses this feature by comparing two different tables from the databases to show one single view, which Grafana is really helping with. In a visualized way, the charts can be displayed on one dashboard, allowing end users who are not familiar with these technical aspects to extract valuable data from it.
Grafana has positively impacted our organization by democratizing data within our company. Before using Grafana, only developers could see the system health, but now our product managers and executives have their own high-level dashboards, which has improved cross-departmental transparency and alignment.
What needs improvement?
I find that the alerting UI in Grafana can be complex for new users. While it is very powerful, it takes time to learn the differences between contact points, notification policies, and silences.
The documentation can be improved to provide more detailed descriptions, allowing new users to understand more concepts before they come to knowledge transfer sessions with senior team members.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Grafana for over four years to build real-time observability dashboards and monitor our complex infrastructure and application performance.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In my experience, Grafana is extremely stable. Even when handling millions of data points, the visualization layer remains responsive. Since it is decoupled from the actual data storage, the dashboard stays up even if one of our underlying data sources is temporarily slow.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Grafana's scalability is impressive. It is highly scalable and built on a big data architecture capable of ingesting trillions of data points. For our on-premise instance, I use a high availability configuration with a shared database to manage growth.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support for Grafana is solid. The community support is massive, and the technical support team is very helpful with complex PromQL troubleshooting.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Before Grafana, I relied solely on the native monitoring console of our cloud providers, like AWS CloudWatch. I switched to Grafana because I needed a way to see all my clouds in a single dashboard rather than switching between multiple tabs.
How was the initial setup?
Grafana's forever free tier for the cloud version allowed the initial setup cost to be zero. As I scaled, I moved to a paid tier based on my number of active series and users, which I found to be very fair compared to other observability vendors.
What was our ROI?
I identified over-provisioned servers and reduced my AWS monthly bill by 15%, which is a significant saving in terms of costs. Additionally, I see a 25% improvement in MTTD due to my shift from text-based logs to visualized dashboards.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I purchased my Grafana Cloud subscription through the AWS Marketplace, which simplified my procurement process and allowed me to apply the cost towards my AWS committed spend.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I looked at Kibana and Tableau before deciding on Grafana. I chose Grafana because Kibana is mostly limited to Elasticsearch, whereas Grafana can connect to almost any data source. Unlike Tableau, Grafana is specifically optimized for time series data and real-time monitoring.
What other advice do I have?
When Grafana highlights an issue, it will trigger email alerts that engineers can rely on. Immediately when they receive these alerts, they involve other support teams, and a bridge is initialized to start troubleshooting.
For those looking into using Grafana, I advise starting with the Grafana play site to see what is possible and then using the pre-built dashboards from the Grafana dashboard gallery. There is likely already a perfect dashboard available for free tailored to your tech stack.
Grafana is unique in that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table, a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere. My overall rating for this product is 10 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Stunning Dashboards with Powerful Calculations
What do you like best about the product?
- Beautiful Dashboards
- Calculations and Transformations on any dashboard
What do you dislike about the product?
- Alerting limitations
- Learning knowledge curve
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
- Overcome Zabbix dashboard limitations
- Presenting data collected by prometheus
Open-Source Observability Tools Engineers Love
What do you like best about the product?
Grafana Labs combines open-source values with practical observability tools that engineers genuinely love and use at scale.
What do you dislike about the product?
One challenge is that Grafana’s flexibility and rapid evolution can create a learning curve and occasional complexity for new users as the ecosystem grows.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Grafana Labs solves the problem of making complex system data observable and understandable in real time, which benefits me by enabling faster debugging, better reliability, and clearer insights across metrics, logs, and traces from a single platform.
Fast, Flexible, and Instantly Readable Dashboards
What do you like best about the product?
What I like best: Grafana is fast, clear, and flexible. It turns raw metrics into something instantly readable, and the plugin ecosystem makes it easy to connect to anything without hassle.
What do you dislike about the product?
What I dislike: Large dashboards can get heavy, and managing too many data sources or panels becomes messy fast. Alerting still feels a bit clunky compared to how polished the visualization side is.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Perfect observation; Metrics, logs, and traces land in one place, so I don’t waste time jumping between tools. It gives a clear, real-time view of system behavior, which helps spot issues faster and understand trends without digging through raw data. That visibility makes troubleshooting quicker and decisions cleaner.
Great free tool for custom dashboards
What do you like best about the product?
I love how Grafana provides powerful and customizable dashboards. It makes visualizing data from various sources like Wazuh and CrowdStrike super easy, giving us clear insights in real-time. The flexibility in creating alerts and tracking metrics is a huge plus for us to monitor our cloud resources.
What do you dislike about the product?
While Grafana is great for data visualization, setting up some of the more advanced features can be a bit complex. It can take time to learn all the configurations and integrations, especially if you're new to the platform.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Grafana Labs helps us make sense of complex data by turning it into easy-to-read, customizable dashboards. It pulls in data from tools like Wazuh and CrowdStrike, so we can quickly spot issues and track important metrics. This saves me time and makes it much easier to stay on top of security events and performance.
A solid observability tool that keeps getting better
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.
Versatile and powerful dashboarding tool for monitoring
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.
Dashboard as a Service DaaS
What do you like best about the product?
- Graphic Design
- Dashboards + Alerting + Ticketing + Annotations
- Integrate with any Data Source
- Auto Dashboards recommended
- You find templates on the Forums
- Continous features improvements
- Easy implementation
- Daily basis visualizing
- Data Transformation
What do you dislike about the product?
- You do not find lot of documentation about doing the dashboards and understanding the calculations/transformations.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
- Infrastructure status page
- Daily Up Status
Outstanding visualization tool with easiness
What do you like best about the product?
The query builder and visualization features are outstanding. We can quickly implement and configure dashboards.
What do you dislike about the product?
GUI can sometimes feel clumsy, with many windows and panels, making it difficult to scroll and navigate.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
With Grafana, we monitor time series and analyze the data over a period of time using visuals. We also create alerts.
clean visualization of financial data
What do you like best about the product?
Perform the predictability of financial data
What do you dislike about the product?
Limited usage language for some functionalities
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
cash flow of my company
