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Grafana vs Metabase: What are the differences?
Grafana and Metabase are two popular data visualization and analytics tools. Let's explore the key differences between them:
Architecture: Grafana is a standalone application that focuses primarily on visualizing time series data from various data sources. It provides a wide range of visualization options and is known for its flexibility and extensibility. Metabase, on the other hand, is a lightweight application that aims to simplify data exploration and analysis for non-technical users. It focuses on providing an intuitive and easy-to-use interface with limited customization options, making it more suitable for quick insights.
Data sources: Grafana supports a wide variety of data sources, including databases, cloud services, monitoring tools, and more. It provides plugins and APIs for integrating with different datasources, enabling users to create complex visualizations and dashboards. Metabase, on the other hand, has a limited number of supported data sources out-of-the-box. It is primarily designed for connecting to databases and performing simple queries without requiring SQL knowledge.
User Interface: Grafana offers a highly customizable user interface with drag-and-drop capabilities, allowing users to create interactive dashboards with graphs, tables, and alerts. It provides a rich set of features for data exploration, filtering, and drilling down into specific data points. Metabase, on the other hand, offers a simpler user interface focused on ease of use and self-service analytics. It provides predefined visualizations and templates to quickly generate insights without requiring any technical skills.
Security and Access Control: Grafana provides robust security features with multi-user authentication, granular access control, and integration with external identity providers. It allows fine-grained control over who can access and modify dashboards and data sources. Metabase, on the other hand, has limited security features and is more suitable for small teams or organizations where strict access control is not a requirement.
Community and Ecosystem: Grafana has a large and active community of developers and users, which has resulted in a rich ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and integrations. It has an extensive marketplace where users can find and download ready-to-use dashboards and panels. Metabase, on the other hand, has a smaller community and a more limited ecosystem. While it provides some level of extensibility, it lacks the breadth of options available in Grafana.
Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning: Grafana provides limited support for advanced analytics and machine learning out-of-the-box. It focuses primarily on visualizing and analyzing time series data. Metabase, on the other hand, lacks advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities altogether. It is more suitable for basic data exploration and visualization, rather than advanced analytics use cases.
In summary, Grafana is a flexible and extensible data visualization tool with a wide range of supported data sources, advanced analytics capabilities, and a large community. Metabase, on the other hand, is a lightweight and intuitive tool focused on simplicity and ease of use, with limited customization options and a smaller community.
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.
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 Metabase
- Database visualisation62
- Open Source45
- Easy setup41
- Dashboard out of the box36
- Free23
- Simple14
- Support for many dbs9
- Easy embedding7
- Easy6
- It's good6
- AGPL : wont help with adoption but depends on your goal5
- BI doesn't get easier than that5
- Google analytics integration4
- Multiple integrations4
- Easy set up4
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1
Cons of Metabase
- Harder to setup than similar tools7