Grafana vs Prometheus: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Grafana and Prometheus

1. Data Source and Purpose:

Grafana is a data visualization and monitoring tool that connects to various data sources, including Prometheus, to display and analyze metrics in real-time. It focuses on providing rich visualizations and dashboards for data monitoring and analysis. On the other hand, Prometheus is a time-series database and monitoring system that collects and stores metric data from various sources. It is designed to gather and query time-series data for alerting, anomaly detection, and operational insight purposes.

2. Data Collection and Storage:

Grafana relies on external data sources, such as Prometheus, to collect and store metrics. It acts as a frontend visualization tool that displays data from different sources. Prometheus, in contrast, is responsible for actively collecting metrics through a pull-based model. It has its own compact, efficient time-series database for storing the collected data.

3. Alerting and Notification:

Grafana provides alerting and notification capabilities through its built-in alerting engine. It supports creating dynamic alert rules and sending notifications through various channels like email and Slack. Prometheus, on the other hand, has a comprehensive alerting system that integrates with its data collection and storage capabilities. It allows users to define alert rules based on metric thresholds, trend analysis, and other advanced conditions.

4. Scaling and High Availability:

Grafana can be scaled horizontally by deploying multiple instances behind a load balancer to handle increasing user traffic. It also supports high availability setups using distributed databases. Prometheus, being a single server application, can be scaled vertically by adding resources to the server. To achieve high availability, Prometheus can utilize external components like remote storage systems or federation with other Prometheus servers.

5. Querying and Filtering Data:

Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for querying and filtering data from various data sources, including Prometheus. It offers a flexible query editor that allows users to specify time ranges, metric filters, and aggregation functions to retrieve and visualize specific data points. Prometheus, on the other hand, has its own querying language called PromQL, which provides powerful capabilities to fetch and manipulate metric data. It supports querying based on labels, range selectors, and various mathematical and aggregation functions.

6. Integration and Ecosystem:

Grafana has a wide range of integrations with various data sources, databases, and cloud platforms. It can connect to Prometheus as a data source and display Prometheus metrics in its dashboards. Additionally, Grafana has a large ecosystem of plugins and community-built dashboards for enhanced functionality and customization. Prometheus, being a standalone monitoring system, has integrations with different exporters, libraries, and exporters to collect metrics from applications, services, and infrastructure components. It also provides an extensive ecosystem of third-party tools and exporters.

In Summary, Grafana is a data visualization tool that connects to Prometheus and other data sources for real-time metrics visualization, while Prometheus is a time-series database and monitoring system that actively collects and stores metric data for operational insights and alerting. Grafana focuses on rich visualizations, whereas Prometheus specializes in data collection, storage, querying, and alerting capabilities.