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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Monitoring
  4. Monitoring Tools
  5. Dropwizard Metrics vs Grafana

Dropwizard Metrics vs Grafana

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Grafana
Grafana
Stacks18.4K
Followers14.6K
Votes415
GitHub Stars70.7K
Forks13.1K
Dropwizard Metrics
Dropwizard Metrics
Stacks29
Followers18
Votes0
GitHub Stars7.9K
Forks1.8K

Dropwizard Metrics vs Grafana: What are the differences?

  1. Data Collection: Dropwizard Metrics primarily focuses on collecting and reporting application-level metrics like response times, error rates, and throughput. In contrast, Grafana is a visualization tool that displays time series data obtained from various data sources, including databases, APIs, and custom metrics.

  2. Dashboard Customization: Grafana offers extensive dashboard customization options, allowing users to create interactive and visually appealing dashboards with a variety of visualization tools. On the other hand, Dropwizard Metrics provides a simple reporting mechanism without advanced dashboard customization capabilities.

  3. Alerting Capabilities: Grafana provides robust alerting features that allow users to set up alerts based on defined thresholds for specific metrics. Dropwizard Metrics, however, lacks built-in alerting capabilities and relies on integrations with additional tools for alerting.

  4. Integration Flexibility: Grafana offers a wide range of integrations with various data sources and databases, making it versatile for different types of data visualization requirements. Dropwizard Metrics, on the other hand, is more focused on monitoring application-specific metrics within the JVM.

  5. Historical Data Analysis: Grafana enables users to explore historical data trends and patterns through its advanced querying and visualization capabilities. In comparison, Dropwizard Metrics primarily focuses on real-time monitoring and reporting of metrics without extensive historical data analysis features.

  6. Community Support: Grafana has a larger and more active community of users and contributors, leading to regular updates, new features, and extensive documentation. Dropwizard Metrics, while well-established, may have a smaller community compared to Grafana, affecting the availability of resources and support.

In Summary, Dropwizard Metrics and Grafana differ in their focus on data collection, dashboard customization, alerting capabilities, integration flexibility, historical data analysis, and community support.

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Advice on Grafana, Dropwizard Metrics

StackShare
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
Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceonGrafanaGrafana

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
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
Grafana
Dropwizard Metrics
Dropwizard Metrics

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.

It is a Java library which gives you insight into what your code does in production. It provides a powerful toolkit of ways to measure the behavior of critical components in your production environment. It provides you with full-stack visibility.

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
Full-stack visibility; application-level metrics
Statistics
GitHub Stars
70.7K
GitHub Stars
7.9K
GitHub Forks
13.1K
GitHub Forks
1.8K
Stacks
18.4K
Stacks
29
Followers
14.6K
Followers
18
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
Graphite
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Graphite
Graphite
Logback
Logback
Log4j
Log4j
Jetty
Jetty

What are some alternatives to Grafana, Dropwizard Metrics?

Kibana

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

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

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

Netdata

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

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

Sensu

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

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

Lumigo

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

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).

Jaeger

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

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