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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Performance Monitoring
  4. Performance Monitoring
  5. Grafana vs Server Density

Grafana vs Server Density

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Server Density
Server Density
Stacks28
Followers23
Votes2
Grafana
Grafana
Stacks18.4K
Followers14.6K
Votes415
GitHub Stars70.7K
Forks13.1K

Grafana vs Server Density: What are the differences?

What is Grafana? Open source Graphite & InfluxDB Dashboard and Graph Editor. 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 Server Density? Trusted monitoring built by experts. SaaS-based scalable infrastructure monitoring to help businesses save time and money. With advanced server and website monitoring alerts, graphing tools and integrations with all major cloud service providers.

Grafana and Server Density are primarily classified as "Monitoring" and "Performance Monitoring" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Grafana are:

  • Create, edit, save & search dashboards
  • Change column spans and row heights
  • Drag and drop panels to rearrange

On the other hand, Server Density provides the following key features:

  • Open source agent, plugin library, full API and Nagios compatibility
  • Automatic install via script, system packages, Puppet, Chef, Ansible & Salt Stack
  • Apps for iOS, Android, Apple TV and Slackbot

Grafana is an open source tool with 29.3K GitHub stars and 5.55K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Grafana's open source repository on GitHub.

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Advice on Server Density, Grafana

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

Server Density
Server Density
Grafana
Grafana

SaaS-based scalable infrastructure monitoring to help businesses save time and money. With advanced server and website monitoring alerts, graphing tools and integrations with all major cloud service providers.

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.

Open source agent, plugin library, full API and Nagios compatibility;Automatic install via script, system packages, Puppet, Chef, Ansible & Salt Stack;Apps for iOS, Android, Apple TV and Slackbot;Easy to use monitoring API including agentless monitoring;Website and API availability monitoring with response time alerting from the USA, UK, Europe, Australia, Russia, Japan, South Africa and more;Reduce monitoring noise, reduce false alerts and improve life on call
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
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
70.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
13.1K
Stacks
28
Stacks
18.4K
Followers
23
Followers
14.6K
Votes
2
Votes
415
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 1
    Great interface, accurate, simple setup
  • 1
    Great support and continuous improvement
Pros
  • 89
    Beautiful
  • 68
    Graphs are interactive
  • 57
    Free
  • 56
    Easy
  • 34
    Nicer than the Graphite web interface
Cons
  • 1
    No interactive query builder
Integrations
MySQL
MySQL
NGINX
NGINX
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Python
Python
PHP
PHP
Memcached
Memcached
Hadoop
Hadoop
Redis
Redis
Docker
Docker
Graphite
Graphite
InfluxDB
InfluxDB

What are some alternatives to Server Density, Grafana?

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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