Grafana vs OpsDash vs Rollbar

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Grafana

17.9K
14.3K
+ 1
415
OpsDash

12
50
+ 1
12
Rollbar

1.6K
1.1K
+ 1
531

Grafana vs OpsDash vs Rollbar: What are the differences?

Introduction

Grafana, OpsDash, and Rollbar are software tools used for monitoring and analyzing data in various applications. While they have some similarities, they also have key differences that set them apart from each other.

  1. Integration Capabilities: Grafana provides extensive integration capabilities, allowing users to connect with multiple data sources and display them on customizable dashboards. On the other hand, OpsDash focuses on system-level monitoring and provides standard integrations with popular tools and technologies, such as MySQL, Postgres, and AWS services. Rollbar focuses primarily on error tracking and provides integrations with various programming languages and frameworks.

  2. Alerting Mechanisms: Grafana offers flexible alerting mechanisms, allowing users to set up custom rules and notifications based on specific data criteria. OpsDash provides built-in alerting features, enabling users to set up alerts based on system-level metrics and events. Rollbar also provides alerting capabilities, sending notifications for errors and exceptions in real-time.

  3. Visualization Options: Grafana offers a wide range of visualization options, including various types of graphs, charts, and tables. Users can customize the visual appearance of their data to fit their specific needs. OpsDash focuses primarily on providing out-of-the-box visualizations tailored specifically for system-level monitoring. Rollbar focuses on error tracking and provides visual representations of errors and exceptions in the form of stack traces and error reports.

  4. User Interface: Grafana offers a user-friendly interface with a high level of customization options. It allows users to easily create and configure dashboards, panels, and queries. OpsDash has a simple and intuitive interface, making it easy to navigate and set up system-level monitoring. Rollbar also provides a user-friendly interface, allowing users to quickly access and analyze error data.

  5. Open Source vs. Commercial: Grafana is an open-source tool with a large and active community contributing to its development. It is free to use and can be customized according to individual requirements. OpsDash is a commercial tool with a licensing fee, offering enterprise-grade system monitoring capabilities. Rollbar is also a commercial tool with pricing based on usage, providing error tracking and monitoring features.

  6. Focus and Scope: Grafana is a comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform that can be used for various data sources and applications. It provides a wide range of features and capabilities for monitoring, visualization, and analysis. OpsDash focuses primarily on system-level monitoring, providing real-time insights into the health and performance of servers and services. Rollbar focuses on error tracking and monitoring, helping developers identify and resolve issues in their applications.

In summary, Grafana is a versatile open-source tool with extensive integration capabilities and customizable visualizations. OpsDash is a commercial tool focused on system-level monitoring, providing built-in integrations and alerting features. Rollbar is a commercial tool specialized in error tracking and offers multiple language and framework integrations for real-time error monitoring.

Advice on Grafana, OpsDash, and Rollbar
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 828.5K 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.

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Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 614.1K 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.

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Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 756.4K 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.

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Replies (2)
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.

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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/

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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."

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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)
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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

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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 .

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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.

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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).

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Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana

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

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Povilas Brilius
PHP Web Developer at GroundIn Software · | 0 upvotes · 629K 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.

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Pros of Grafana
Pros of OpsDash
Pros of Rollbar
  • 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
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Nice dashboards
  • 2
    Smart Agent
  • 2
    Database Monitoring Dasboards
  • 1
    Affordable
  • 1
    Uptime Monitoring
  • 1
    Alerting
  • 1
    Integrations
  • 74
    Consolidates similar errors by impact
  • 64
    Centralize error management
  • 63
    Slack integration
  • 58
    Github integration
  • 47
    Usage based pricing
  • 32
    Insane customer support
  • 23
    Instant search
  • 21
    Heroku integration
  • 18
    Consolidate errors by OS
  • 15
    Great Free Plan
  • 15
    Trello integration
  • 13
    Flexible logging (not just exceptions)
  • 11
    Simple yet powerful error tracking tool
  • 9
    Multiple Language Support
  • 7
    Consolidate errors by browser
  • 6
    Easy setup
  • 6
    Query errors with RQL
  • 5
    Best rails exception handler
  • 5
    Deployment tracking is a nice free bonus
  • 5
    Awesome service
  • 5
    Simple and fast integration
  • 4
    Easy setup, friendly ui, demo, lots of integrations
  • 3
    Beat your users to the error report
  • 3
    Server-side + client-side
  • 3
    Errors Analysis
  • 3
    Clear and concise information.
  • 3
    Powerful
  • 2
    Mailgun integration
  • 2
    Easy integration with sails.js
  • 2
    Bitbucket integration
  • 1
    Clear errors on deploy or push
  • 1
    Easy Set up familiar UI that doesn't make you look dumb
  • 1
    Teams
  • 1
    Gitlab integration

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

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

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      - No public GitHub repository available -
      - No public GitHub repository available -

      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 OpsDash?

      OpsDash an all-in-one solution for monitoring servers, services, uptime & databases. It's been built from the ground up for maximum performance. OpsDash is fast to setup and easy to use. Available in SaaS and self-hosted versions.

      What is Rollbar?

      Rollbar is the leading continuous code improvement platform that proactively discovers, predicts, and remediates errors with real-time AI-assisted workflows. With Rollbar, developers continually improve their code and constantly innovate ra

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      What are some alternatives to Grafana, OpsDash, and Rollbar?
      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