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Grafana vs Graylog vs Raygun: What are the differences?
# Introduction
Key differences between Grafana, Graylog, and Raygun are highlighted below:
1. **Data Visualization**: Grafana excels in data visualization capabilities with interactive and customizable dashboards, while Graylog focuses more on log management and analysis. Raygun, on the other hand, specializes in real-time error tracking and monitoring, providing detailed insights into application performance issues.
2. **Alerting Functionality**: Grafana offers robust alerting features that allow users to set up alerts based on predefined thresholds or complex queries. Graylog also provides alerting capabilities but is more focused on log alerting and monitoring. Raygun, however, focuses on error alerts and notifications to help developers identify and resolve issues quickly.
3. **Data Sources**: Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including databases, monitoring systems, and cloud services, making it versatile for various data integration needs. Graylog primarily integrates with log sources, making it ideal for log management and analysis. Raygun integrates with web and mobile applications, providing insights into user experiences and performance issues.
4. **Community Support**: Grafana has a large and active community of developers and users who contribute plugins, dashboards, and support resources. Graylog also has a supportive community but is more focused on log management use cases. Raygun has a dedicated support team and community forums to help users troubleshoot issues and optimize their error tracking processes.
5. **User Interface**: Grafana has a user-friendly and intuitive interface with drag-and-drop features for dashboard customization. Graylog offers a clean and efficient interface for log management and analysis, focusing on real-time log monitoring. Raygun provides a streamlined interface for error tracking and monitoring, displaying critical data points and trends for quick analysis.
6. **Deployment Options**: Grafana can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, offering flexibility for organizations with different hosting preferences. Graylog is primarily deployed on-premises but also offers a cloud version for easier setup and maintenance. Raygun is a cloud-based solution, providing effortless integration with web and mobile applications for real-time error tracking and monitoring.
In Summary, Grafana stands out for its data visualization capabilities, Graylog excels in log management and analysis, and Raygun specializes in real-time error tracking and monitoring for web and mobile applications.
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.
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.
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.
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 Graylog
- Open source19
- Powerfull13
- Well documented8
- Alerts6
- User authentification5
- Flexibel query and parsing language5
- Alerts and dashboards3
- User management3
- Easy query language and english parsing3
- Easy to install2
- Manage users and permissions1
- A large community1
- Free Version1
Pros of Raygun
- Easy setup and brilliant features31
- Integrates with many tools I use (e.g. GitHub, HipChat)19
- Huge range of programming languages supported19
- Support for JavaScript source maps17
- Makes my job so much easier17
- No rate limiting16
- I have so much love for Raygun. Amazing support too15
- Works with Xamarin (including native iOS crashes)15
- Unlimited team sizes on all levels14
- Responsive and fast app13
- Easy setup, fast reporting, and constantly improving9
- Great customer support and awesome T-shirts8
- Real user monitoring3
- Custom dashboards for software health2
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1
Cons of Graylog
- Does not handle frozen indices at all1