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Grafana vs Redash: What are the differences?
Introduction: Grafana and Redash are both popular data visualization and analytics tools used for monitoring and analyzing data in real-time. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two.
Data Source Integration: Grafana offers a wide range of integration options for data sources, including databases, cloud-based services, and monitoring systems. It supports more than 50 data sources, allowing users to connect and visualize data from various platforms. On the other hand, Redash has a limited selection of supported data sources, primarily focused on databases. This difference in data source integration provides Grafana users with more flexibility in connecting to different data sets.
Dashboard Customization: Grafana provides extensive customization options, allowing users to design visually appealing and interactive dashboards. It offers various types of panels, including graphs, tables, and heatmaps, and allows users to configure panel settings, apply themes, and create dynamic annotations. Redash, on the other hand, offers fewer customization options and has a more standardized dashboard layout. Grafana's flexibility in dashboard customization gives users greater control over the visual representation of their data.
Alerting and Alert Management: Grafana has a built-in alerting system that allows users to set up alerts based on specific conditions and thresholds. It provides features such as alert rules, notification channels, and alert history, enabling users to monitor critical metrics and receive notifications when anomalies occur. Redash lacks a native alerting system and requires users to rely on external tools or custom scripting for setting up alerts. Grafana's integrated alerting capabilities offer a more streamlined approach to real-time monitoring.
Collaboration and Sharing: Grafana offers robust collaboration features, allowing multiple users to work on the same dashboard simultaneously. It provides options for sharing dashboards with specific users or groups, controlling permissions, and setting up team-based access. Redash also supports dashboard sharing but lacks advanced collaboration features. Grafana's collaborative capabilities make it suitable for teams working on data analysis and visualization projects.
Community Support and Extensions: Grafana has a large and active community, contributing to a wide range of plugins, extensions, and integrations. It offers a marketplace for users to browse and install community-built plugins, enhancing the functionality of the platform. Redash, on the other hand, has a smaller community and a more limited selection of extensions and integrations. Grafana's vibrant community support provides users with access to a plethora of resources and options for extending the platform's capabilities.
Data Querying and Transformation: Grafana provides a powerful query editor that supports various data query languages, including SQL, Prometheus Query Language, and Elasticsearch Query DSL. It allows users to transform and manipulate data before visualization, providing advanced data processing capabilities. Redash also supports querying data from multiple sources but has fewer options for data transformation. Grafana's robust query editor gives users more flexibility in extracting and transforming data for analysis.
In summary, Grafana offers extensive data source integration, advanced dashboard customization options, built-in alerting capabilities, collaboration features, a vibrant community for support and extensions, and a powerful query editor with data transformation functionalities, making it a comprehensive solution for data visualization and analytics. Redash, while also effective for data visualization, has limitations in terms of data source integration, dashboard customization, alerting, collaboration, community support, and data querying capabilities.
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 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 Redash
- Open Source9
- SQL Friendly3
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1
Cons of Redash
- All results are loaded into RAM before displaying1
- Memory Leaks1