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Grafana vs Solarwinds: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will explore the key differences between Grafana and Solarwinds. Both Grafana and Solarwinds are popular monitoring and visualization tools used in the IT industry. However, they have distinct features and functionalities that set them apart from each other. Let's dive deeper into these differences.
Data Source Support: Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including popular databases, cloud services, and APIs. It can easily connect to systems like Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and InfluxDB, making it a versatile tool for visualization. On the other hand, Solarwinds primarily focuses on network monitoring and infrastructure management, providing support for SNMP-based devices and network hardware. While both tools offer flexibility in supporting various data sources, Grafana has a broader scope in terms of compatibility.
Visualization Capabilities: Grafana is widely known for its rich visualization capabilities, allowing users to create interactive dashboards and charts with ease. It offers a wide array of customizable options, such as dynamic annotations, real-time streaming, and multi-dimensional data exploration. Solarwinds, on the other hand, provides a more traditional set of visualizations focused on network and infrastructure monitoring, such as device performance charts and traffic graphs. Grafana's robust visualization features make it a preferred choice for users seeking advanced and flexible visual representation of their data.
Open-Source vs. Commercial Tool: Grafana is an open-source monitoring and visualization tool, which means it is free to use and actively supported by a large community of developers. Solarwinds, on the other hand, is a commercial tool that offers various versions with different pricing plans. The open-source nature of Grafana allows users to customize and extend its functionalities based on their specific requirements, while Solarwinds offers a more comprehensive and feature-rich platform for enterprise-level monitoring needs.
Alerting and Notification: Grafana provides built-in alerting and notification capabilities, allowing users to define threshold-based rules and receive alerts via various channels like email, Slack, or PagerDuty. Solarwinds also offers similar alerting features, but its focus is primarily on network and system alerts. Grafana's alerting system provides more flexibility and customization options, making it suitable for a wider range of use cases.
Community Support and Ecosystem: Grafana benefits from its active and vibrant community, with a wide range of plugins, templates, and community-driven resources available for users. It has a strong ecosystem that extends its capabilities beyond traditional monitoring tasks. Solarwinds also has a community of users, but it may not be as extensive as Grafana due to its commercial nature. Grafana's strong community support ensures continuous development and innovation, providing users with a wealth of resources to enhance their monitoring workflows.
User Interface and Ease of Use: Grafana offers a user-friendly and intuitive interface that makes it easy for users to create, manage, and explore their monitoring dashboards. It provides a drag-and-drop editor, real-time preview, and a vast library of pre-built panels and components. Solarwinds, while having a user-friendly interface, may require a bit more initial configuration and setup. Grafana's focus on simplicity and ease of use makes it accessible to users with varying levels of technical expertise.
In summary, Grafana offers broader data source support, advanced visualization capabilities, and the flexibility of an open-source tool. Solarwinds, on the other hand, focuses on network monitoring and provides a more comprehensive commercial solution. Grafana's active community, rich ecosystem, and user-friendly interface set it apart as a powerful monitoring and visualization tool in the industry.
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 Solarwinds
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1
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