Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Grafana

17.4K
13.9K
+ 1
415
Munin

72
95
+ 1
10
Add tool

Grafana vs Munin: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code provides a comparison of Grafana and Munin, highlighting key differences between the two.

  1. Data Visualization and Dashboarding: Grafana is primarily designed for data visualization and dashboarding. It offers a highly customizable visual interface with a wide range of options for graphs, charts, and panels. On the other hand, Munin focuses more on providing a comprehensive monitoring solution with pre-defined graphs and limited customization options.

  2. Data Sources and Integrations: Grafana offers support for a wide variety of data sources, including popular databases, monitoring systems, and cloud services, allowing users to aggregate and visualize data from multiple sources in a single dashboard. Munin, on the other hand, has limited support for data sources and primarily focuses on monitoring local resources and system metrics.

  3. Alerting and Notification: Grafana provides advanced alerting capabilities, allowing users to set up and customize alerts based on specific metrics and conditions. It also offers various notification channels, including email, Slack, and PagerDuty. Munin, on the other hand, lacks built-in alerting and notification features and requires additional customization or integrations for setting up alerts.

  4. Scalability and Distributed Monitoring: Grafana is designed to handle large-scale deployments and supports distributed monitoring setups. It allows users to set up high availability and clustering for improved scalability and performance. Munin, on the other hand, is more suitable for smaller environments and lacks native support for distributed monitoring.

  5. Ease of Use and Configuration: Grafana provides a user-friendly and intuitive interface, making it easier for users to create and manage dashboards. It also offers extensive documentation and a large community for support. Munin, while relatively simple to set up and configure, can be less user-friendly, especially for complex setups or customizations.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Grafana has a large and active community, with a wide range of user-contributed plugins, extensions, and integrations. It also has a marketplace for sharing and discovering pre-built dashboards and panels. Munin, while having a smaller community, still offers a decent number of plugins and extensions, though not as extensive as Grafana's ecosystem.

In summary, Grafana provides a more feature-rich and flexible solution for data visualization, with support for various data sources, advanced alerting, and a larger community and ecosystem. Munin, on the other hand, focuses more on comprehensive monitoring with pre-defined graphs and simpler configurations, suitable for smaller environments.

Advice on Grafana and Munin
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 774.6K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

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.

See more
Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 559.9K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

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.

See more
Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 704.2K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

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.

See more
Replies (2)
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

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/

See more
Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

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.

See more
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafana
and
KibanaKibana

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."

See more
Replies (7)
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana
at

For our Predictive Analytics platform, we have used both Grafana and Kibana

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)
See more
Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

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

See more
Bram Verdonck
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana
at

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 .

See more
Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

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.

See more
Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

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).

See more
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana

I use Grafana because it is without a doubt the best way to visualize metrics

See more
Povilas Brilius
PHP Web Developer at GroundIn Software · | 0 upvotes · 586.5K views
Recommends
on
KibanaKibana
at

@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.

See more
Decisions about Grafana and Munin
Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Junior QA Tester at SolarMarket · | 2 upvotes · 172.1K views

I learned a lot from Grafana, especially the issue of data monitoring, as it is easy to use, I learned how to create quick and simple dashboards. InfluxDB, I didn't know any other types of DBMS, I only knew about relational DBMS or not, but the difference was the scalability of both, but with influxDB, I knew how a time series DBMS works and finally, Telegraf, which is from the same company as InfluxDB, as I used the Windows Operating System, Telegraf tools was the first in the industry, in addition, it has complete documentation, facilitating its use, I learned a lot about connections, without having to make scripts to collect the data.

See more
Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Junior QA Tester at SolarMarket · | 15 upvotes · 348.5K views

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.

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Grafana
Pros of Munin
  • 89
    Beautiful
  • 68
    Graphs are interactive
  • 57
    Free
  • 56
    Easy
  • 34
    Nicer than the Graphite web interface
  • 26
    Many integrations
  • 18
    Can build dashboards
  • 10
    Easy to specify time window
  • 10
    Can collaborate on dashboards
  • 9
    Dashboards contain number tiles
  • 5
    Open Source
  • 5
    Integration with InfluxDB
  • 5
    Click and drag to zoom in
  • 4
    Authentification and users management
  • 4
    Threshold limits in graphs
  • 3
    Alerts
  • 3
    It is open to cloud watch and many database
  • 3
    Simple and native support to Prometheus
  • 2
    Great community support
  • 2
    You can use this for development to check memcache
  • 2
    You can visualize real time data to put alerts
  • 0
    Grapsh as code
  • 0
    Plugin visualizationa
  • 3
    Good defaults
  • 2
    Extremely fast to install
  • 2
    Alerts can trigger any command line program
  • 2
    Adheres to traditional Linux standards
  • 1
    Easy to write custom plugins

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Grafana
Cons of Munin
  • 1
    No interactive query builder
    Be the first to leave a con

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Grafana?

    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.

    What is Munin?

    Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and "what just happened to kill our performance?" problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Grafana?
    What companies use Munin?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Grafana or Munin.
    Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Grafana?
    What tools integrate with Munin?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    Blog Posts

    May 21 2020 at 12:02AM

    Rancher Labs

    KubernetesAmazon EC2Grafana+12
    5
    1485
    Jun 26 2018 at 3:26AM

    Twilio SendGrid

    GitHubDockerKafka+10
    11
    9935
    JavaScriptGitHubNode.js+29
    14
    13383
    GitHubPythonReact+42
    49
    40680
    What are some alternatives to Grafana and Munin?
    Datadog
    Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
    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.
    Graphite
    Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand
    Splunk
    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.
    See all alternatives