Graphite vs Stackdriver

Overview

Stackdriver

Stacks318

Followers349

Votes67

Graphite

Stacks383

Followers419

Votes42

GitHub Stars6.0K

Forks1.3K

Graphite vs Stackdriver: What are the differences?

Introduction: In the realm of monitoring and observability tools, Graphite and Stackdriver are two popular choices. Both serve the purpose of tracking and analyzing performance metrics, but they do exhibit distinctive features that set them apart. In this comparison, we will explore the key differences between Graphite and Stackdriver to help you make an informed decision for your monitoring needs.

Data Storage and Query Language: Graphite stores data using Whisper, a custom time-series database, and utilizes a simple query language for data retrieval. In contrast, Stackdriver employs a more advanced cloud-based storage system that allows for more complex querying capabilities using Google's Query Language. This difference makes Stackdriver suitable for environments with large-scale data and intricate data analysis requirements.
Visualization Capabilities: Graphite offers a basic graphing functionality that allows users to plot time-series data. On the other hand, Stackdriver provides a more robust visualization tool with customizable dashboards, monitoring charts, and alerting mechanisms. These features enable users to create comprehensive visual representations of their system's performance metrics.
Integration and Ecosystem: Graphite has a rich ecosystem of plugins and extensions that enable seamless integration with various data sources and tools. Stackdriver, being part of Google Cloud Platform, offers native integration with other GCP services, making it a preferred choice for users already operating within the Google Cloud ecosystem.
Alerting and Notification: Graphite lacks built-in alerting capabilities and requires users to rely on third-party tools for setting up alerts based on metric thresholds. In contrast, Stackdriver provides robust alerting functionalities that allow users to set up notifications based on predefined conditions, ensuring timely responses to any performance anomalies.
Scalability and Performance: Graphite's scalability is limited by the underlying storage mechanism, Whisper, which may pose challenges in handling large volumes of data. Stackdriver, being a cloud-based solution, offers auto-scaling capabilities and high availability, making it a more suitable choice for applications requiring scalability and performance optimization.
Cost and Pricing Model: Graphite is an open-source tool, making it a cost-effective solution for organizations looking to build and manage their monitoring infrastructure. In comparison, Stackdriver follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, with charges based on the volume of data ingested and stored, which may be more suitable for enterprises seeking a fully managed, cloud-based monitoring solution.

In Summary, Graphite and Stackdriver differ in their data storage, visualization capabilities, integration, alerting, scalability, and pricing model, making each tool more suitable for specific use cases and preferences.

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Advice on Stackdriver, Graphite

Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Grafana

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.

869k views869k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Stackdriver	Graphite
Google Stackdriver provides powerful monitoring, logging, and diagnostics. It equips you with insight into the health, performance, and availability of cloud-powered applications, enabling you to find and fix issues faster.	Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand
Monitoring;Logging;Diagnostics;Application Tracing;Error Reporting;Alerting;Uptime Monitoring;Multi-cloud;Production Debugger;	carbon - a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data;whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD);graphite webapp - A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 6.0K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.3K
Stacks 318	Stacks 383
Followers 349	Followers 419
Votes 67	Votes 42
Pros & Cons
Pros 19 Monitoring 11 Logging 8 Alerting 7 Tracing 6 Uptime Monitoring Cons 2 Not free	Pros 16 Render any graph 9 Great functions to apply on timeseries 8 Well supported integrations 6 Includes event tracking 3 Rolling aggregation makes storage managable
Integrations
No integrations available	Sensu Nagios Logstash Windows Server Netdata Riemann Diamond Telegraf collectd Ganglia

What are some alternatives to Stackdriver, Graphite?

Grafana

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Amazon CloudWatch

It helps you gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. It retrieve your monitoring data, view graphs to help take automated action based on the state of your cloud environment.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

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Graphite vs Stackdriver

Overview