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

Grafana vs OpenCensus

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Grafana
Grafana
Stacks18.4K
Followers14.6K
Votes415
GitHub Stars70.7K
Forks13.1K
OpenCensus
OpenCensus
Stacks644
Followers21
Votes0

Grafana vs OpenCensus: What are the differences?

## Key Differences Between Grafana and OpenCensus

1. **Purpose of Use**: Grafana is primarily a visualization tool that allows users to create customizable dashboards for monitoring and analyzing data coming from various sources. On the other hand, OpenCensus is a set of libraries that helps developers to collect distributed traces and metrics from their applications to enable monitoring, tracing, and performance analysis.

2. **Integration Capabilities**: Grafana supports integration with a wide range of data sources such as databases, monitoring systems, and even custom applications through plugins. In contrast, OpenCensus provides native support for integration with programming languages and frameworks like Java, Python, and Go, simplifying the process of instrumenting applications for observability.

3. **Flexibility in Data Visualization**: Grafana offers a high level of flexibility and interactivity in visualizing time series data through its rich set of visualization options, including graphs, charts, and gauges. OpenCensus, on the other hand, focuses on collecting telemetry data and exporting it to monitoring systems like Prometheus and Zipkin for further analysis and visualization.

4. **Adoption and Community Support**: Grafana has gained widespread adoption in the industry due to its user-friendly interface, extensive plugin ecosystem, and strong community support. OpenCensus, being a more developer-centric tool, is actively maintained by Google and has seen increasing adoption within the software development community for improved observability.

5. **Scope of Monitoring**: Grafana is more focused on visualizing monitoring data from various sources, offering advanced features like alerts, annotations, and heat maps for in-depth analysis. In comparison, OpenCensus is designed for tracing and monitoring system performance, providing detailed insights into the behavior of distributed applications and microservices.

6. **Ease of Deployment**: Grafana can be easily deployed as a standalone application or as part of a monitoring stack like Prometheus and Graphite, making it convenient for users to set up monitoring solutions. OpenCensus, while requiring integration within application code, offers libraries and exporters for popular languages and platforms to streamline the deployment process for developers.

In Summary, Grafana excels in visualizing monitoring data with a user-friendly interface and extensive plugin support, while OpenCensus is focused on instrumenting applications for collecting distributed traces and metrics to enhance observability and performance analysis in distributed systems. 

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Advice on Grafana, OpenCensus

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
OpenCensus
OpenCensus

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 set of libraries for various languages that allow you to collect application metrics and distributed traces, then transfer the data to a backend of your choice in real time. This data can be analyzed by developers and admins to understand the health of the application and debug problems.

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
Standard wire protocols; Consistent APIs for handling trace and metric data
Statistics
GitHub Stars
70.7K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
13.1K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
18.4K
Stacks
644
Followers
14.6K
Followers
21
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
Prometheus
Prometheus
Stackdriver
Stackdriver
Datadog
Datadog
SignalFx
SignalFx
Zipkin
Zipkin
LightStep
LightStep
Jaeger
Jaeger
Wavefront
Wavefront
Solarwinds
Solarwinds
Postmates API
Postmates API

What are some alternatives to Grafana, OpenCensus?

New Relic

New Relic

The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.

Datadog

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

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.

Raygun

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications. Detect, diagnose and resolve issues that are affecting end users with greater speed and accuracy.

Nagios

Nagios

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

AppSignal

AppSignal

AppSignal gives you and your team alerts and detailed metrics about your Ruby, Node.js or Elixir application. Sensible pricing, no aggressive sales & support by developers.

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

AppDynamics

AppDynamics

AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics.

Zabbix

Zabbix

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

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