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Grafana vs Sumo Logic: What are the differences?
Key Differences between Grafana and Sumo Logic
Introduction
Grafana and Sumo Logic are both popular tools used for monitoring and analyzing data in IT systems. Although they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two. This article aims to highlight the important distinctions.
1. Data Visualization Capabilities:
Grafana is primarily a data visualization and dashboarding tool. It provides a rich set of features and options to create visually appealing and interactive dashboards. On the other hand, Sumo Logic is more focused on log and machine data analytics, offering advanced search and correlation capabilities. While Grafana excels at displaying data in a customizable and intuitive manner, Sumo Logic empowers users to deeply analyze log data.
2. Open-Source vs Commercial Product:
Grafana is an open-source project that enjoys a large and active community. As a result, it benefits from continuous development and frequently releases new features and improvements. In contrast, Sumo Logic is a commercial product that requires a subscription. With a commercial product, users gain access to support and regular updates but may have to pay for licensing and usage.
3. Data Sources and Integrations:
Grafana supports a wide range of databases, time series databases, and other data sources, such as MySQL, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and InfluxDB. It also allows users to create custom data sources and integrate with external services through plugins. On the other hand, Sumo Logic specializes in log analysis and offers built-in integrations with various sources like AWS CloudTrail, Kubernetes, and more. It also provides APIs for custom log ingestion.
4. Alerting and Monitoring Features:
Grafana provides robust alerting and monitoring capabilities, allowing users to set alerts based on threshold conditions and receive notifications. It supports different notification channels and has the ability to create complex alert rules. Sumo Logic, as a log analytics platform, also offers alerting functionality but is more focused on analyzing logs in real-time and identifying patterns or anomalies.
5. Querying and Searching Capabilities:
Grafana offers a powerful query editor that allows users to write queries using different database query languages. It provides an intuitive interface for creating queries and customizing visualizations. On the other hand, Sumo Logic excels at log searching with its advanced search language. It offers features like autocomplete, field-value suggestions, and the ability to search across multiple logs in real-time.
6. Multi-Tenancy and Access Control:
Grafana supports multi-tenancy, allowing users to create organizations, teams, and users with different access levels to dashboards and data sources. It provides fine-grained access control and role-based access management. Sumo Logic, as a cloud-native analytics platform, also offers multi-tenancy features but with more granular control. It provides features like data partitioning, user management, and access controls at various levels.
In Summary, Grafana is more focused on data visualization and offers extensive customization options, while Sumo Logic specializes in log analytics and provides advanced searching and correlation capabilities. Grafana is open-source, while Sumo Logic is a commercial product.
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 Sumo Logic
- Search capabilities11
- Live event streaming5
- Pci 3.0 compliant3
- Easy to setup2
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Cons of Grafana
- No interactive query builder1
Cons of Sumo Logic
- Expensive2
- Occasionally unreliable log ingestion1
- Missing Monitoring1