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Grafana vs Splunk: What are the differences?
Grafana and Splunk are both widely used tools for monitoring and analyzing data. Let's explore the key differences between them.
Data Sources: Grafana is known for its extensive range of data source plugins, which allows users to connect and visualize data from various sources such as databases, cloud providers, and more. On the other hand, Splunk primarily focuses on machine-generated data, making it a robust solution for analyzing logs, metrics, and event data.
Visualization Capabilities: Grafana is renowned for its powerful visualization capabilities. It offers a wide range of graph types and advanced options for customizing visualizations. Additionally, Grafana supports the creation of dashboards with multiple panels, allowing users to combine different visualizations and efficiently monitor data. Splunk, although capable of visualizing data, may not offer as many options and flexibility as Grafana when it comes to customizing and organizing visualizations.
Query Language: When it comes to querying data, Grafana and Splunk employ different approaches. Grafana typically uses query languages specific to the data source being used, such as PromQL for Prometheus or InfluxQL for InfluxDB. On the other hand, Splunk has its own powerful search processing language known as SPL (Splunk Processing Language), which provides a wide range of functions and operators for analyzing and extracting data.
Community and User Support: Grafana has a large and active open-source community, resulting in a plethora of resources, tutorials, and plugins created by users. This vibrant community makes it easier for users to find solutions, share knowledge, and extend the functionality of Grafana. In contrast, Splunk does have an active user community, but its access and support are mainly limited to licensed users, which may provide a more restricted environment for collaboration and community-driven innovation.
Pricing and Licensing: Grafana is primarily an open-source software and is freely available to users, making it an attractive choice for budget-conscious individuals and small organizations. In contrast, Splunk offers both free and enterprise versions, with the latter requiring a license that can be costly based on data volume and usage.
Ecosystem Integration: Grafana is well-integrated with various open-source monitoring and logging tools, creating a robust ecosystem for data analysis and visualization. It can easily integrate with popular tools like Prometheus, Graphite, and Elasticsearch. Splunk, while also providing integration options, may have a more limited ecosystem due to its proprietary nature and focus on its own solutions.
In summary, Grafana offers extensive data source support, powerful visualization capabilities, and a vibrant open-source community, while Splunk specializes in analyzing machine-generated data, provides its own search processing language, and offers a range of licensed options.
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.
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 Splunk
- API for searching logs, running reports3
- Alert system based on custom query results3
- Splunk language supports string, date manip, math, etc2
- Dashboarding on any log contents2
- Custom log parsing as well as automatic parsing2
- Query engine supports joining, aggregation, stats, etc2
- Rich GUI for searching live logs2
- Ability to style search results into reports2
- Granular scheduling and time window support1
- Query any log as key-value pairs1
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1
Cons of Splunk
- Splunk query language rich so lots to learn1