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Grafana vs Sentry: What are the differences?
Grafana and Sentry are two popular tools used in software monitoring and observability. Let's explore the key differences between them.
Data Visualization vs. Error Tracking: Grafana is primarily a data visualization and analytics platform that allows users to create and display dynamic dashboards. It is widely used for monitoring and troubleshooting various metrics and data sources. On the other hand, Sentry is an error tracking and logging platform that helps developers identify and fix issues in their applications by capturing and analyzing error logs.
Scope of Monitoring: Grafana focuses on monitoring various metrics and data sources, such as server performance, database usage, network traffic, and application logs. It provides a versatile platform for visualizing and analyzing time series data. In contrast, Sentry is primarily concerned with monitoring and tracking software errors, exceptions, and crashes. It helps developers identify specific code errors or exceptions and gather relevant information for debugging.
User Interface and Dashboards: Grafana provides a highly interactive and customizable user interface for creating and managing dashboards. It offers a wide range of visualization options, such as graphs, tables, and heatmaps, and allows users to configure alerts and notifications. Sentry, on the other hand, offers a more focused interface tailored towards error and exception tracking. It provides detailed error logs, stack traces, and associated metadata to help developers diagnose and resolve issues efficiently.
Integration with Monitoring Systems: Grafana supports a wide range of data sources and can integrate with various monitoring systems, including Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB, and Elasticsearch. It provides plugins and APIs to connect with external systems and fetch data for visualization and analysis. Sentry, on the other hand, integrates with application development frameworks and platforms, such as Python, JavaScript, Ruby, and Django, to capture and track errors generated by the application code.
Community and Ecosystem: Grafana has a large and active community of users, developers, and contributors. It offers extensive documentation, forums, and public dashboards shared by the community. Grafana also has an ecosystem of plugins and extensions developed by the community, providing additional functionality and integration options. Although Sentry also has a community of users and contributors, it is relatively smaller compared to Grafana.
Primary Users and Use Cases: Grafana is commonly used by system administrators, DevOps engineers, and data analysts who require real-time monitoring and visualization of various metrics. It is widely adopted in industries such as IT operations, cloud computing, and IoT. Sentry, on the other hand, is primarily used by developers and software engineers who need to track and resolve application errors, both in production and development environments.
In summary, Grafana is a data visualization and analytics platform, while Sentry specializes in error tracking and logging. Grafana is more versatile and suited for monitoring various metrics and data sources, with a wide range of visualization options and integrations. Sentry, on the other hand, provides detailed error logs, stack traces, and metadata to help developers diagnose and fix application errors efficiently.
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.
I essentially inherited a Shopify theme that was originally created by an agency. After discovering a number of errors being thrown in the Dev Console just by scrolling through the website, I needed more visibility over any errors happening in the field. Having used both Sentry and TrackJS, I always got lost in the TrackJS interface, so I felt more comfortable introducing Sentry. The Sentry free tier is also very generous, although it turns out the theme threw over 15k errors in less than a week.
I highly recommend setting up error tracking from day one. Theoretically, you should never need to upgrade from the free tier if you're keeping on top of the errors...
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 Sentry
- Consolidates similar errors and makes resolution easy238
- Email Notifications121
- Open source108
- Slack integration84
- Github integration71
- Easy49
- User-friendly interface44
- The most important tool we use in production28
- Hipchat integration18
- Heroku Integration17
- Good documentation15
- Free tier14
- Self-hosted11
- Easy setup9
- Realiable7
- Provides context, and great stack trace6
- Feedback form on error pages4
- Love it baby4
- Gitlab integration3
- Filter by custom tags3
- Super user friendly3
- Captures local variables at each frame in backtraces3
- Easy Integration3
- Performance measurements1
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1
Cons of Sentry
- Confusing UI12
- Bundle size4