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Chronograf vs Grafana: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will compare and highlight the key differences between Chronograf and Grafana, two popular visualization tools used for monitoring and analyzing time-series data.
User Interface: Chronograf offers a clean and intuitive user interface that is packed with features designed specifically for time-series data analysis. It provides a simple and easy-to-use experience for users, making it a suitable choice for beginners. On the other hand, Grafana has a more advanced user interface with extensive customization options and a wider range of visualizations, making it a preferred choice for more experienced users who require advanced analytics and complex dashboarding capabilities.
Data Sources: Chronograf is tightly integrated with InfluxDB, an open-source time-series database, and primarily supports InfluxDB as its data source. It is optimized for working with InfluxDB and may have limited compatibility with other databases. In contrast, Grafana supports a wide variety of data sources including InfluxDB, Prometheus, Graphite, Elasticsearch, and more. This flexibility allows users to connect with and visualize data from multiple sources in a single dashboard.
Alerting and Monitoring: While Chronograf provides basic alerting functionality through its integrated Kapacitor framework, it may be more limited compared to Grafana's alerting capabilities. Grafana offers comprehensive alerting and monitoring features, including threshold-based alerts, anomaly detection, and integration with popular alerting tools like PagerDuty and Slack. This makes it a preferred choice for users who require robust and advanced alerting capabilities.
Community Support and Ecosystem: Grafana has a larger and more active community compared to Chronograf, which translates to a wider range of plugins, integrations, and community-contributed dashboards. This vibrant ecosystem allows Grafana users to access and leverage a vast library of pre-built dashboards, integrations with various data sources, and extensive user support through online forums and communities.
Scalability and Performance: Chronograf is designed to work well with InfluxDB and offers good performance for small to medium-sized datasets. However, for larger datasets and high-frequency data ingestion, Grafana may provide better scalability and performance. Grafana has built-in support for distributed querying, caching, and load balancing, making it a suitable choice for handling large-scale time-series data.
Enterprise Features: Grafana offers more robust enterprise features, such as role-based access control (RBAC), data source permissions, LDAP/AD integration, and multi-tenancy support. These features are essential for organizations that require secure and controlled access to their data, and are not available in Chronograf's standard offering.
In summary, the key differences between Chronograf and Grafana lie in their user interface, supported data sources, alerting and monitoring capabilities, community support, scalability and performance, as well as enterprise features. Choosing between the two depends on specific use cases, user requirements, and the complexity of the monitoring and visualization 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 Chronograf
- Can build dashboards1
- Open Source1
- Easy1
- Free1
- It´s extremely compatible with Influxdb1
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
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Cons of Chronograf
Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1