Grafana vs M3

Overview

Grafana

Stacks18.4K

Followers14.6K

Votes415

GitHub Stars70.7K

Forks13.1K

M3

Stacks12

Followers61

Votes0

GitHub Stars4.9K

Forks465

Grafana vs M3: What are the differences?

Developers describe Grafana as "Open source Graphite & InfluxDB Dashboard and Graph Editor". Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins. On the other hand, M3 is detailed as "Open source metrics platform built on M3DB, a distributed time-series database by Uber". A Prometheus and Graphite compatible metrics platform which includes a native distributed time series database, a highly dynamic and performant aggregation service, query engine and other supporting infrastructure.

Grafana and M3 can be primarily classified as "Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by Grafana are:

Create, edit, save & search dashboards
Change column spans and row heights
Drag and drop panels to rearrange

On the other hand, M3 provides the following key features:

Prometheus Integration
Graphite Integration
Scalable Clusters (up to billions of metrics)

Grafana and M3 are both open source tools. Grafana with 29.7K GitHub stars and 5.64K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than M3 with 1.95K GitHub stars and 162 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Grafana, M3

StackShare

Jun 25, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: “We need better analytics & insights into our Elasticsearch cluster. Grafana, which ships with advanced support for Elasticsearch, looks great but isn’t officially supported/endorsed by Elastic. Kibana, on the other hand, is made and supported by Elastic. I’m wondering what people suggest in this situation."

663k views663k

Comments

Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Grafana

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
Able to display automation test results,
System monitoring / Nginx API,
Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

869k views869k

Comments

Mat

Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud

Oct 30, 2019

Needs advice

We're looking for a Monitoring and Logging tool. It has to support AWS (mostly 100% serverless, Lambdas, SNS, SQS, API GW, CloudFront, Autora, etc.), as well as Azure and GCP (for now mostly used as pure IaaS, with a lot of cognitive services, and mostly managed DB). Hopefully, something not as expensive as Datadog or New relic, as our SRE team could support the tool inhouse. At the moment, we primarily use CloudWatch for AWS and Pandora for most on-prem.

794k views794k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Grafana	M3
Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.	A Prometheus and Graphite compatible metrics platform which includes a native distributed time series database, a highly dynamic and performant aggregation service, query engine and other supporting infrastructure.
Create, edit, save & search dashboards;Change column spans and row heights;Drag and drop panels to rearrange;Use InfluxDB or Elasticsearch as dashboard storage;Import & export dashboard (json file);Import dashboard from Graphite;Templating	Prometheus Integration; Graphite Integration; Scalable Clusters (up to billions of metrics); Reliably Replicated; Highly Compressed; Highly Performant (hundreds of millions of writes per second); Arbitrary Time Precision; Out of order writes; Fully open source
Statistics
GitHub Stars 70.7K	GitHub Stars 4.9K
GitHub Forks 13.1K	GitHub Forks 465
Stacks 18.4K	Stacks 12
Followers 14.6K	Followers 61
Votes 415	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 89 Beautiful 68 Graphs are interactive 57 Free 56 Easy 34 Nicer than the Graphite web interface Cons 1 No interactive query builder	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Graphite InfluxDB	Prometheus Graphite

What are some alternatives to Grafana, M3?

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Graphite

Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).