Grafana vs Graphite

Overview

Graphite

Stacks383

Followers419

Votes42

GitHub Stars6.0K

Forks1.3K

Grafana

Stacks18.4K

Followers14.6K

Votes415

GitHub Stars70.7K

Forks13.1K

Grafana vs Graphite: 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, Graphite is detailed as "A highly scalable real-time graphing system". Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand.

Grafana and Graphite 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, Graphite provides the following key features:

carbon - a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data
whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD)
graphite webapp - A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo

"Beautiful" is the top reason why over 65 developers like Grafana, while over 14 developers mention "Render any graph" as the leading cause for choosing Graphite.

Grafana and Graphite are both open source tools. It seems that Grafana with 29.3K GitHub stars and 5.55K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Graphite with 4.58K GitHub stars and 1.2K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Grafana has a broader approval, being mentioned in 559 company stacks & 313 developers stacks; compared to Graphite, which is listed in 97 company stacks and 20 developer stacks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Graphite, Grafana

Matt

Senior Software Engineering Manager at PayIt

May 3, 2021

Decidedon

Grafana

Prometheus

Kubernetes

Grafana and Prometheus together, running on Kubernetes , is a powerful combination. These tools are cloud-native and offer a large community and easy integrations. At PayIt we're using exporting Java application metrics using a Dropwizard metrics exporter, and our Node.js services now use the prom-client npm library to serve metrics.

1.1M views1.1M

Comments

Leonardo Henrique da

Pleno QA Enginneer at SolarMarket

Dec 8, 2020

Decided

The objective of this work was to develop a system to monitor the materials of a production line using IoT technology. Currently, the process of monitoring and replacing parts depends on manual services. For this, load cells, microcontroller, Broker MQTT, Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana were used. It was implemented in a workflow that had the function of collecting sensor data, storing it in a database, and visualizing it in the form of weight and quantity. With these developed solutions, he hopes to contribute to the logistics area, in the replacement and control of materials.

402k views402k

Comments

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

Detailed Comparison

Graphite	Grafana
Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand	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.
carbon - a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data;whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD);graphite webapp - A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo	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
Statistics
GitHub Stars 6.0K	GitHub Stars 70.7K
GitHub Forks 1.3K	GitHub Forks 13.1K
Stacks 383	Stacks 18.4K
Followers 419	Followers 14.6K
Votes 42	Votes 415
Pros & Cons
Pros 16 Render any graph 9 Great functions to apply on timeseries 8 Well supported integrations 6 Includes event tracking 3 Rolling aggregation makes storage managable	Pros 89 Beautiful 68 Graphs are interactive 57 Free 56 Easy 34 Nicer than the Graphite web interface Cons 1 No interactive query builder
Integrations
Sensu Nagios Logstash Windows Server Netdata Riemann Diamond Telegraf collectd Ganglia	InfluxDB

What are some alternatives to Graphite, Grafana?

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.

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).

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Telegraf

It is an agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. Design goals are to have a minimal memory footprint with a plugin system so that developers in the community can easily add support for collecting metrics.

Related Comparisons

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, Graphite provides the following key features:

carbon - a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data
whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD)
graphite webapp - A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo

"Beautiful" is the top reason why over 65 developers like Grafana, while over 14 developers mention "Render any graph" as the leading cause for choosing Graphite.

Grafana vs Graphite