Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Grafana vs Power BI: What are the differences?
Introduction: Grafana and Power BI are both popular tools used for data visualization and analysis. While they have similar functionalities, there are key differences between the two that make them suitable for different use cases.
Data Sources and Integrations: Grafana is known for its extensive range of data sources and integrations. It supports a wide variety of open-source and commercial databases, cloud services, and time series databases. On the other hand, Power BI primarily focuses on Microsoft's ecosystem, providing seamless integration with popular Microsoft products like Excel, SQL Server, and Azure services.
Flexibility and Customizability: Grafana offers more flexibility and customizability in terms of visualizations and dashboards. It provides a rich set of options to design and customize dashboards, including different chart types, layouts, and themes. Power BI, although providing a good range of pre-built visualizations, has a more structured approach with fewer options for customization.
Community and Documentation: Grafana has a strong open-source community with active contributors, resulting in a vibrant ecosystem. It offers comprehensive documentation, guides, and forums that help users get started and resolve issues. Power BI, being a Microsoft product, benefits from a large user base, extensive support, and well-documented resources.
Pricing and Licensing: Grafana is open-source and free to use, making it an attractive choice for many organizations. However, some Grafana plugins or enterprise features may require licensing fees. Power BI offers different pricing tiers based on user roles and features, including a free version with limitations and paid plans with advanced functionalities.
Real-time Streaming and Monitoring: Grafana excels in real-time streaming and monitoring of metrics and logs due to its compatibility with leading time series databases. It offers features like alerts and notifications, anomaly detection, and data-driven collaboration. While Power BI supports real-time analytics, it is more suitable for analyzing static or periodic data rather than continuously streaming, high-frequency data.
Ease of Use and Learning Curve: Power BI is designed with a user-friendly interface and provides straightforward drag-and-drop functionalities, making it easier for business users to create visualizations and dashboards without coding knowledge. Grafana, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve, mainly targeting users with technical expertise or developer background to leverage its full capabilities.
In Summary, Grafana offers extensive data source integrations and customizability, with a strong open-source community, while Power BI focuses on seamless integration with Microsoft products, user-friendliness, and real-time analysis capabilities.
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.
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.
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/
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.
Power BI is really easy to start with. If you have just several Excel sheets or CSV files, or you build your first automated pipeline, it is actually quite intuitive to build your first reports.
And as we have kept growing, all the additional features and tools were just there within the Azure platform and/or Office 365.
Since we started building Mews, we have already passed several milestones in becoming start up, later also a scale up company and now getting ready to grow even further, and during all these phases Power BI was just the right tool for us.
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 Power BI
- Cross-filtering18
- Database visualisation4
- Powerful Calculation Engine2
- Access from anywhere2
- Intuitive and complete internal ETL2
- Azure Based Service1
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1