Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Ganglia

28
87
+ 1
0
Grafana

17.3K
13.9K
+ 1
415
Add tool

Ganglia vs Grafana: What are the differences?

Introduction

The use of monitoring tools has become crucial for businesses to track, analyze, and visualize their data effectively. Two widely used monitoring tools in the IT industry are Ganglia and Grafana. While both platforms offer monitoring capabilities, there are several key differences between the two that set them apart.

  1. Scalability: Ganglia is designed to handle large-scale monitoring environments, making it an ideal choice for organizations with thousands of nodes. It utilizes a hierarchical design to efficiently collect and aggregate metrics. On the other hand, Grafana is more suitable for smaller to mid-sized deployments, with a focus on visualizing data from various sources.

  2. Data Sources: Ganglia primarily relies on plugins and built-in modules to gather metrics from systems, including network devices, servers, and applications. It is particularly proficient at collecting and displaying system-level statistics. Conversely, Grafana is agnostic to data sources and can integrate with a wide range of tools and databases, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Elasticsearch, offering flexibility in accessing and analyzing diverse data sets.

  3. Dashboard Customization: Grafana shines when it comes to customizable dashboards. It provides an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface for users to create visually appealing and interactive dashboards with various panels and widgets. Ganglia, while offering basic customization options, does not provide the same level of flexibility and visual appeal for creating rich dashboards.

  4. Alerting and Notification: Grafana offers advanced alerting capabilities, allowing users to define and configure alerts based on specific thresholds or conditions. It also supports various notification channels such as email, Slack, and PagerDuty to ensure timely alerts reach the right individuals. In contrast, Ganglia does not provide built-in alerting and notification functionality, requiring users to rely on external tools or scripts for this purpose.

  5. Community and Support: Grafana boasts a large and vibrant community with extensive documentation, active forums, and a rich ecosystem of plugins and integrations. This ensures users have plenty of resources and support to address their queries or extend the functionality of the tool. While Ganglia also has an active community, its user base and support offerings are relatively smaller compared to Grafana.

  6. User Interface and Ease of Use: Grafana's user interface is praised for its simplicity and intuitiveness. It provides a user-friendly experience for both beginners and experienced users. Ganglia, while functional, may require a steeper learning curve due to its less intuitive interface and configuration process.

In summary, Ganglia excels in large-scale monitoring environments with its hierarchical design and system-level statistics, whereas Grafana offers unparalleled flexibility, customization options, and visualization capabilities with a wide range of data sources and advanced alerting features.

Advice on Ganglia and Grafana
Susmita Meher
Senior SRE at African Bank · | 4 upvotes · 782.4K views
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafanaGraphiteGraphite
and
PrometheusPrometheus

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.

See more
Replies (1)
Sakti Behera
Technical Specialist, Software Engineering at AT&T · | 3 upvotes · 567.7K views
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafanaPrometheusPrometheus

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.

See more
Mat Jovanovic
Head of Cloud at Mats Cloud · | 3 upvotes · 711.7K views
Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogGrafanaGrafana
and
PrometheusPrometheus

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.

See more
Replies (2)
Lucas Rincon
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

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/

See more
Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

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.

See more
Needs advice
on
GrafanaGrafana
and
KibanaKibana

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."

See more
Replies (7)
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana
at

For our Predictive Analytics platform, we have used both Grafana and Kibana

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)
See more
Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

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

See more
Bram Verdonck
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana
at

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 .

See more
Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

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.

See more
Recommends
on
KibanaKibana

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).

See more
Recommends
on
GrafanaGrafana

I use Grafana because it is without a doubt the best way to visualize metrics

See more
Povilas Brilius
PHP Web Developer at GroundIn Software · | 0 upvotes · 592.6K views
Recommends
on
KibanaKibana
at

@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.

See more
Decisions about Ganglia and Grafana
Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Junior QA Tester at SolarMarket · | 2 upvotes · 174.5K views

I learned a lot from Grafana, especially the issue of data monitoring, as it is easy to use, I learned how to create quick and simple dashboards. InfluxDB, I didn't know any other types of DBMS, I only knew about relational DBMS or not, but the difference was the scalability of both, but with influxDB, I knew how a time series DBMS works and finally, Telegraf, which is from the same company as InfluxDB, as I used the Windows Operating System, Telegraf tools was the first in the industry, in addition, it has complete documentation, facilitating its use, I learned a lot about connections, without having to make scripts to collect the data.

See more
Leonardo Henrique da Paixão
Junior QA Tester at SolarMarket · | 15 upvotes · 353K views

The objective of this work was to develop a system to monitor the materials of a production line using IoT technology. Currently, the process of monitoring and replacing parts depends on manual services. For this, load cells, microcontroller, Broker MQTT, Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana were used. It was implemented in a workflow that had the function of collecting sensor data, storing it in a database, and visualizing it in the form of weight and quantity. With these developed solutions, he hopes to contribute to the logistics area, in the replacement and control of materials.

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Ganglia
Pros of Grafana
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 89
      Beautiful
    • 68
      Graphs are interactive
    • 57
      Free
    • 56
      Easy
    • 34
      Nicer than the Graphite web interface
    • 26
      Many integrations
    • 18
      Can build dashboards
    • 10
      Easy to specify time window
    • 10
      Can collaborate on dashboards
    • 9
      Dashboards contain number tiles
    • 5
      Open Source
    • 5
      Integration with InfluxDB
    • 5
      Click and drag to zoom in
    • 4
      Authentification and users management
    • 4
      Threshold limits in graphs
    • 3
      Alerts
    • 3
      It is open to cloud watch and many database
    • 3
      Simple and native support to Prometheus
    • 2
      Great community support
    • 2
      You can use this for development to check memcache
    • 2
      You can visualize real time data to put alerts
    • 0
      Grapsh as code
    • 0
      Plugin visualizationa

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of Ganglia
    Cons of Grafana
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 1
        No interactive query builder

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is Ganglia?

      It is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and Grids. It is based on a hierarchical design targeted at federations of clusters.

      What is Grafana?

      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.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      Jobs that mention Ganglia and Grafana as a desired skillset
      Postman
      San Francisco, United States
      What companies use Ganglia?
      What companies use Grafana?
      See which teams inside your own company are using Ganglia or Grafana.
      Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

      Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

      What tools integrate with Ganglia?
      What tools integrate with Grafana?

      Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

      Blog Posts

      May 21 2020 at 12:02AM

      Rancher Labs

      KubernetesAmazon EC2Grafana+12
      5
      1486
      Jun 26 2018 at 3:26AM

      Twilio SendGrid

      GitHubDockerKafka+10
      11
      9938
      JavaScriptGitHubNode.js+29
      14
      13387
      GitHubPythonReact+42
      49
      40682
      What are some alternatives to Ganglia and Grafana?
      collectd
      collectd gathers statistics about the system it is running on and stores this information. Those statistics can then be used to find current performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning). Or if you just want pretty graphs of your private server and are fed up with some homegrown solution you're at the right place, too.
      Zabbix
      Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.
      Nagios
      Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.
      Munin
      Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and "what just happened to kill our performance?" problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.
      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.
      See all alternatives