Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Azure Monitor vs Grafana: What are the differences?
Introduction:
Azure Monitor and Grafana are both monitoring and visualization platforms used to gain insights into the performance and health of applications and infrastructure. While they share common goals, there are key differences between the two.
Data Source Integration: Azure Monitor is tightly integrated with Azure services and provides native monitoring capabilities for Azure resources. It offers direct access to data sources such as Azure Activity Logs, Azure Metrics, and Azure Diagnostic Logs. On the other hand, Grafana is a more flexible solution that supports a wide range of data sources, including Azure, AWS, databases, and custom applications. It provides a unified dashboard experience by aggregating data from multiple sources.
Alerting and Notification: Azure Monitor includes advanced alerting capabilities that can be configured to send notifications based on customizable thresholds and conditions. It supports multiple notification channels like email, SMS, Azure Functions, and Logic Apps. Grafana, on the other hand, doesn't have built-in alerting features, but it can be integrated with external alerting services like Grafana Cloud or third-party alerting tools, providing more customization options for alerting and notification workflows.
Visualization and Dashboarding: Azure Monitor offers a range of pre-built monitoring dashboards tailored to specific Azure services, providing out-of-the-box visualizations for monitoring metrics and logs. It also includes customizable workbooks for aggregating and analyzing data. Grafana, on the other hand, is known for its highly customizable and interactive dashboarding abilities. It provides a vast library of visualization options and allows users to create rich, dynamic dashboards using a wide range of plugins and community-created visualizations.
Community and User Base: Azure Monitor is a part of the broader Azure ecosystem and has a large user base, which provides access to extensive documentation, community forums, and official support channels. Grafana, being an open-source project, has a thriving community that continuously contributes to its improvement. It offers community plugins, templates, and forums for collaboration and sharing of knowledge and best practices.
Cost and Licensing: Azure Monitor is a native service provided by Microsoft Azure and is included in most Azure subscriptions. The cost usually depends on the service tiers and data ingestion volumes. Grafana, being open-source, is free to use and can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. However, additional costs may incur if you choose to use Grafana Cloud or any premium plugins or services associated with it.
Ease of Use and Setup: Azure Monitor requires minimal setup and configuration, especially for Azure resources, as it is integrated natively. It provides a user-friendly interface for monitoring and alert management. Grafana, on the other hand, might require more setup and configuration efforts initially. It needs to be deployed and connected to different data sources manually. Its advanced features and extensive customization options may require some expertise to utilize fully.
In summary, Azure Monitor provides native monitoring capabilities for Azure resources and has a deeper integration with the Azure ecosystem, while Grafana is a more flexible and customizable solution that supports a wide range of data sources and provides extensive visualization 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.
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 Azure Monitor
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
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Azure Monitor
Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1