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Grafana vs Instana: What are the differences?
Key Differences Between Grafana and Instana
1. Integration and Data Sources: Grafana: Grafana is an open-source dashboard and visualization tool that allows integration with various data sources such as databases, APIs, and monitoring tools. It provides flexibility in connecting to different sources and creating custom queries.
Instana: Instana, on the other hand, is an application performance monitoring (APM) solution that automatically discovers and traces applications and microservices. It focuses primarily on monitoring and analyzing the performance of applications and their dependencies, providing in-depth insights into distributed environments.
2. Visualization and Customization: Grafana: Grafana offers a wide range of visualization options, allowing users to create interactive and visually appealing dashboards using charts, graphs, and other visual elements. It provides extensive customization capabilities, enabling users to personalize the appearance and layout of their dashboards.
Instana: Instana focuses more on providing pre-built visualizations and insights based on the gathered data. It offers less customization options compared to Grafana and primarily focuses on presenting performance metrics and actionable insights in a clear and concise manner.
3. Monitoring Approach: Grafana: Grafana is more of a general-purpose monitoring tool that enables users to build their monitoring stack using various data sources and integrations. It allows monitoring different aspects of infrastructure, applications, and services by creating dashboards with visualizations based on the collected data.
Instana: Instana takes a more specialized approach by providing application performance monitoring capabilities out of the box. It automatically discovers and monitors applications and microservices, analyzes performance metrics, and provides real-time insights and anomaly detection.
4. Alerting and Notification: Grafana: Grafana provides flexible alerting and notification capabilities, allowing users to set up alerts based on predefined conditions or custom queries. It supports various notification channels like email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc., to notify users about critical issues or anomalies.
Instana: Instana includes built-in alerting and notification features specifically designed for application performance monitoring. It automatically sets up alerts based on anomalies and deviations from normal behavior and provides integrations with popular communication platforms, ticketing systems, and chat tools.
5. Community and Ecosystem: Grafana: Grafana has a large and active community due to its open-source nature. It has a vast ecosystem with a wide range of plugins, extensions, and community-created dashboards available for users to enhance their monitoring and visualization experience.
Instana: Instana, being a commercial APM solution, has a relatively smaller community compared to Grafana. However, it provides dedicated support and maintains its own ecosystem by continuously updating and improving its capabilities as an APM solution.
6. Pricing and Licensing: Grafana: Grafana is an open-source tool released under the Apache License 2.0. It is free to use and provides enterprise-level features through a commercial offering called Grafana Enterprise.
Instana: Instana is a commercial product that offers different pricing tiers based on the scale and requirements of the user's infrastructure. It offers a 14-day free trial, and pricing depends on factors such as the number of hosts, containers, and APM features required.
In Summary, Grafana is a flexible and customizable dashboard and visualization tool that supports various data sources, while Instana is a specialized application performance monitoring solution that focuses on providing real-time insights and anomaly detection for applications and microservices.
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.
You can look out for Prometheus Instrumentation (https://prometheus.io/docs/practices/instrumentation/) Client Library available in various languages https://prometheus.io/docs/instrumenting/clientlibs/ to create the custom metric you need for AS4000 and then Grafana can query the newly instrumented metric to show on the dashboard.
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.
this is quite affordable and provides what you seem to be looking for. you can see a whole thing about the APM space here https://www.apmexperts.com/observability/ranking-the-observability-offerings/
I worked with Datadog at least one year and my position is that commercial tools like Datadog are the best option to consolidate and analyze your metrics. Obviously, if you can't pay the tool, the best free options are the mix of Prometheus with their Alert Manager and Grafana to visualize (that are complementary not substitutable). But I think that no use a good tool it's finally more expensive that use a not really good implementation of free tools and you will pay also to maintain its.
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."
For our Predictive Analytics platform, we have used both Grafana and Kibana
- Grafana based demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdTB2AcU4Sg
- Kibana based reporting screenshot: https://imgur.com/vuVvZKN
Kibana has predictions and ML algorithms support, so if you need them, you may be better off with Kibana . The multi-variate analysis features it provide are very unique (not available in Grafana).
For everything else, definitely Grafana . Especially the number of supported data sources, and plugins clearly makes Grafana a winner (in just visualization and reporting sense). Creating your own plugin is also very easy. The top pros of Grafana (which it does better than Kibana ) are:
- Creating and organizing visualization panels
- Templating the panels on dashboards for repetetive tasks
- Realtime monitoring, filtering of charts based on conditions and variables
- Export / Import in JSON format (that allows you to version and save your dashboard as part of git)
I use both Kibana and Grafana on my workplace: Kibana for logging and Grafana for monitoring. Since you already work with Elasticsearch, I think Kibana is the safest choice in terms of ease of use and variety of messages it can manage, while Grafana has still (in my opinion) a strong link to metrics
After looking for a way to monitor or at least get a better overview of our infrastructure, we found out that Grafana (which I previously only used in ELK stacks) has a plugin available to fully integrate with Amazon CloudWatch . Which makes it way better for our use-case than the offer of the different competitors (most of them are even paid). There is also a CloudFlare plugin available, the platform we use to serve our DNS requests. Although we are a big fan of https://smashing.github.io/ (previously dashing), for now we are starting with Grafana .
I use Kibana because it ships with the ELK stack. I don't find it as powerful as Splunk however it is light years above grepping through log files. We previously used Grafana but found it to be annoying to maintain a separate tool outside of the ELK stack. We were able to get everything we needed from Kibana.
Kibana should be sufficient in this architecture for decent analytics, if stronger metrics is needed then combine with Grafana. Datadog also offers nice overview but there's no need for it in this case unless you need more monitoring and alerting (and more technicalities).
@Kibana, of course, because @Grafana looks like amateur sort of solution, crammed with query builder grouping aggregates, but in essence, as recommended by CERN - KIbana is the corporate (startup vectored) decision.
Furthermore, @Kibana comes with complexity adhering ELK stack, whereas @InfluxDB + @Grafana & co. recently have become sophisticated development conglomerate instead of advancing towards a understandable installation step by step inheritance.
Pros of Grafana
- Beautiful89
- Graphs are interactive68
- Free57
- Easy56
- Nicer than the Graphite web interface34
- Many integrations26
- Can build dashboards18
- Easy to specify time window10
- Can collaborate on dashboards10
- Dashboards contain number tiles9
- Open Source5
- Integration with InfluxDB5
- Click and drag to zoom in5
- Authentification and users management4
- Threshold limits in graphs4
- Alerts3
- It is open to cloud watch and many database3
- Simple and native support to Prometheus3
- Great community support2
- You can use this for development to check memcache2
- You can visualize real time data to put alerts2
- Grapsh as code0
- Plugin visualizationa0
Pros of Instana
- Flexible pricing4
- Easy to integrate4
- Insight into RCA3
- Self service3
- Simple query interface2
- Automatic1
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1
Cons of Instana
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