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Grafana vs Wavefront: What are the differences?
Welcome to my comparison of Grafana and Wavefront! Below you will find key differences between these two monitoring and observability platforms.
Data Source Support: Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including popular databases, cloud providers, and more. Wavefront, on the other hand, focuses specifically on time series data from applications and infrastructure, making it ideal for monitoring and analyzing real-time metrics.
Visualization Capabilities: Grafana offers a highly customizable dashboarding system with a variety of visualization options such as charts, graphs, tables, and maps. It allows users to create rich visualizations using different panels and has extensive options for customization. Wavefront also provides visualizations, but its emphasis lies in predefined charts and dashboards optimized for monitoring and troubleshooting.
Alerting and Notification: Grafana provides a robust alerting system that allows users to define conditions and thresholds to trigger notifications. It supports a wide range of notification channels such as email, Slack, PagerDuty, and more. Wavefront also offers alerting capabilities, enabling users to set up alerts based on metrics and send notifications via email, webhooks, and other integrations.
Built-in Functionality: Grafana comes with a built-in data processing engine that allows users to perform calculations, transformations, and aggregations on data. It also supports plugins and extensions for additional functionality. Wavefront, on the other hand, offers advanced analytics capabilities out of the box, including anomaly detection, outlier detection, and predictive analytics.
Scalability: Grafana can be deployed in a distributed manner to handle high volumes of data and users. It supports clustering and can be scaled horizontally to meet growing demands. Wavefront is designed for high scalability and can handle millions of data points per second with low latency. It leverages advanced compression techniques and distributed storage to store and process large amounts of data efficiently.
Community and Ecosystem: Grafana has a vibrant and active community that contributes to its growing ecosystem. It has a vast number of plugins and integrations available, expanding its capabilities beyond the core features. Wavefront, on the other hand, has a smaller but dedicated community and focuses more on providing excellent support and resources directly from the company.
In summary, Grafana offers a wider range of data source support, highly customizable visualizations, and a rich ecosystem of plugins and integrations. On the other hand, Wavefront excels in real-time monitoring, advanced analytics, and scalability for time series data. Ultimately, the choice between Grafana and Wavefront depends on specific monitoring and observability needs.
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.
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/
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.
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 Wavefront
- Custom Visualization1
- Advanced Math1
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1