Grafana vs Skylight

Overview

Skylight

Stacks105

Followers69

Votes51

Grafana

Stacks18.4K

Followers14.6K

Votes415

GitHub Stars70.7K

Forks13.1K

Grafana vs Skylight: What are the differences?

Grafana and Skylight are both popular monitoring and observability tools used in the tech industry. While both serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two that may influence the choice of tool for specific use cases.

Data Sources: Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including databases, cloud services, and other tools, making it highly versatile in terms of data integration. On the other hand, Skylight is designed specifically for monitoring Ruby on Rails applications, limiting its data source compatibility compared to Grafana.
Visualization Capabilities: Grafana offers a plethora of visualization options, including graphs, gauges, and heatmaps, allowing users to create highly customized dashboards. In contrast, Skylight focuses primarily on providing detailed performance data for Ruby on Rails applications, with fewer visualization options compared to Grafana.
Alerting and Notification: Grafana provides robust alerting capabilities, allowing users to set up alerts based on predefined thresholds and receive notifications via various channels. Skylight, while offering some alerting features, is more focused on performance monitoring and may not offer as extensive alerting and notification options as Grafana.
Community Support: Grafana has a large and active community of users and developers, leading to frequent updates, plugins, and resources available for users. Skylight, being more niche in its focus on Ruby on Rails applications, may have a smaller community and fewer resources compared to Grafana.
Cost: Grafana is open-source and free to use, with the option to purchase enterprise features and support. Skylight, on the other hand, offers a free trial but requires a subscription for full access to its features, making it a potentially more costly option depending on the user's needs and budget.
Customization and Extensibility: Grafana's plugin architecture allows for extensive customization and integration with third-party services, making it highly adaptable to unique monitoring requirements. Skylight, while providing in-depth monitoring for Ruby on Rails apps, may have limitations in terms of customization and extensibility beyond its core functionality.

In Summary, while both Grafana and Skylight offer monitoring and observability solutions, Grafana stands out for its wide-ranging data source support, visualization options, and alerting features, while Skylight excels in providing detailed performance monitoring specifically tailored to Ruby on Rails applications. Ultimately, the choice between the two tools will depend on the specific monitoring needs and technical requirements of the user.

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Advice on Skylight, Grafana

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

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Grafana

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

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

Skylight	Grafana
Skylight is a smart profiler for your Rails apps that visualizes request performance across all of your servers.	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.
Skylight looks at how your code is behaving in production, alerting you to improvements you can make before they become showstoppers.;Skylight tells you exactly how your app is spending its time where it matters most—in your production environment;Pricing starts at $20 for the first million requests, with automatic discounts for high-volume customers;Skylight is built with badass hipster tech: Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, Rust, Storm, Dropwizard, Kafka, Cassandra, and more.	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 105	Stacks 18.4K
Followers 69	Followers 14.6K
Votes 51	Votes 415
Pros & Cons
Pros 11 Beautiful UI 8 Sort by 'agony' - lists low hanging fruit fixes 8 Made by ember.js and rails core team members 7 Actionable analytics with concrete numbers 6 Free tier Cons 1 Comparing different timeframes is difficult	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
No integrations available	Graphite InfluxDB

What are some alternatives to Skylight, Grafana?

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 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.

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

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

Zabbix

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

Related Comparisons

Grafana vs Skylight: What are the differences?

Data Sources: Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including databases, cloud services, and other tools, making it highly versatile in terms of data integration. On the other hand, Skylight is designed specifically for monitoring Ruby on Rails applications, limiting its data source compatibility compared to Grafana.
Visualization Capabilities: Grafana offers a plethora of visualization options, including graphs, gauges, and heatmaps, allowing users to create highly customized dashboards. In contrast, Skylight focuses primarily on providing detailed performance data for Ruby on Rails applications, with fewer visualization options compared to Grafana.
Alerting and Notification: Grafana provides robust alerting capabilities, allowing users to set up alerts based on predefined thresholds and receive notifications via various channels. Skylight, while offering some alerting features, is more focused on performance monitoring and may not offer as extensive alerting and notification options as Grafana.
Community Support: Grafana has a large and active community of users and developers, leading to frequent updates, plugins, and resources available for users. Skylight, being more niche in its focus on Ruby on Rails applications, may have a smaller community and fewer resources compared to Grafana.
Cost: Grafana is open-source and free to use, with the option to purchase enterprise features and support. Skylight, on the other hand, offers a free trial but requires a subscription for full access to its features, making it a potentially more costly option depending on the user's needs and budget.
Customization and Extensibility: Grafana's plugin architecture allows for extensive customization and integration with third-party services, making it highly adaptable to unique monitoring requirements. Skylight, while providing in-depth monitoring for Ruby on Rails apps, may have limitations in terms of customization and extensibility beyond its core functionality.

Grafana vs Skylight

Overview