BMC TrueSight and Grafana are leading products in the monitoring and event management domain. BMC TrueSight appears to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive event management and proactive monitoring capabilities, despite its complexity and higher pricing.
Features: BMC TrueSight offers event-driven management, integrating various data sources into a single console. It provides automated root-cause analysis and predictive capabilities, offering a holistic view of infrastructure health. Grafana excels in robust data visualization, dashboard customization, and integrating with multiple data sources, offering powerful graph creation and trend analysis, supported by its strong community.
Room for Improvement: BMC TrueSight needs enhanced application performance monitoring and cloud integrations. Its deployment is complex, requiring substantial resources, and users seek better integration for cloud services. Grafana could improve data correlation, error messaging, and AI capabilities. Better documentation and user interfaces, along with expanded analytical tools, would improve its accessibility.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: BMC TrueSight is generally deployed on-premises or private cloud, supported by knowledgeable technical support, albeit sometimes slow. Grafana is favored for both on-premises and cloud deployments, praised for its supportive community but limited direct customer support. Its setup can be challenging without extra training resources.
Pricing and ROI: BMC TrueSight is known for its complex pricing model and higher costs, justified by its features, providing good ROI through labor cost reduction. Grafana offers flexible pricing with cost-effective open-source and enterprise options, contributing positively to ROI with its extensive features available in free versions.
I identified over-provisioned servers and reduced my AWS monthly bill by 15%, which is a significant saving in terms of costs.
I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten.
The technical support team is very helpful with complex PromQL troubleshooting.
My advice for people who are new to Grafana or considering it is to reach out to the community mainly, as that's the primary benefit of Grafana.
I do not use Grafana's support for technical issues because I have found solutions on Stack Overflow and ChatGPT helps me as well.
It is highly scalable and built on a big data architecture capable of ingesting trillions of data points.
In terms of our company, the infrastructure is using two availability zones in AWS.
In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time.
When something in their dashboard does not work, because it is open source, I am able to find all the relative combinations that people are having, making it much easier for me to fix.
Once you get to a higher load, you need to re-evaluate your architecture and put that into account.
Even when handling millions of data points, the visualization layer remains responsive.
There are some complexities with deployment that could be improved in BMC TrueSight.
It would be better if they made the technology easy to use without needing to read extensive documentation.
Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs.
I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following different requests between different services could be more powerful.
BMC TrueSight licensing costs are on the more expensive side.
In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it.
I purchased my Grafana Cloud subscription through the AWS Marketplace, which simplified my procurement process and allowed me to apply the cost towards my AWS committed spend.
Automated root cause analysis and predictive capabilities are powerful features that assist in resource utilization and capacity planning.
Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data.
The fact that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table is a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere.
You can check those metrics in the incident management tool by filtering the alert source as Grafana, and it helps in reducing production incidents because you can acknowledge and visualize the metrics from Grafana on time.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Grafana | 3.1% |
| BMC TrueSight | 1.0% |
| Other | 95.9% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 24 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 24 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 13 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 10 |
| Large Enterprise | 25 |
BMC TrueSight offers extensive event management and seamless integration, providing comprehensive monitoring across varied infrastructures through its centralized console and Knowledge Modules.
BMC TrueSight delivers robust event management capabilities with seamless integration and comprehensive monitoring of diverse infrastructures. Its single console simplifies management, offering automated triage for standardized alerts, enhancing efficiency. Knowledge Modules support services from hardware to cloud, while proactive monitoring and capacity optimization enhance customization. It efficiently supports mixed environments by providing detailed insights and intelligently routing alerts to reduce noise. While improvements are needed in deployment, integration, AI, automation, reporting, and complexity reduction, it still meets diverse operational needs effectively.
What are BMC TrueSight's key features?
What benefits and ROI should users seek in BMC TrueSight?
BMC TrueSight is widely used in performance and availability monitoring for infrastructure and applications, supporting the monitoring of servers, databases, networks, and IT environments. It is implemented to improve management and reduce downtime, serving needs in data centers and cloud services. Organizations leverage it for event management, comprehensive data center monitoring, and cloud services, using its capabilities for alerting, ticket creation, troubleshooting, and compliance, enhancing operational efficiency globally.
Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics platform that stands out in the field of monitoring solutions. Grafana is widely recognized for its powerful, easy-to-set-up dashboards and visualizations. Grafana supports integration with a wide array of data sources and tools, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, MySQL, Splunk, and Elasticsearch, enhancing its versatility. Grafana has open-source and cloud options; the open-source version is a good choice for organizations with the resources to manage their infrastructure and want more control over their deployment. The cloud service is a good choice if you want a fully managed solution that is easy to start with and scale.
A key strength of Grafana lies in its ability to explore, visualize, query, and alert on the collected data through operational dashboards. These dashboards are highly customizable and visually appealing, making them a valuable asset for data analysis, performance tracking, trend spotting, and detecting irregularities.
Grafana provides both an open-source solution with an active community and Grafana Cloud, a fully managed and composable observability offering that packages together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. The open-source version is licensed under the Affero General Public License version 3.0 (AGPLv3), being free and unlimited. Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise are available for more advanced needs, catering to a wider range of organizational requirements. Grafana offers options for self-managed backend systems or fully managed services via Grafana Cloud. Grafana Cloud extends observability with a wide range of solutions for infrastructure monitoring, IRM, load testing, Kubernetes monitoring, continuous profiling, frontend observability, and more.
The Grafana users we interviewed generally appreciate Grafana's ability to connect with various data sources, its straightforward usability, and its integration capabilities, especially in developer-oriented environments. The platform is noted for its practical alert configurations, ticketing backend integration, and as a powerful tool for developing dashboards. However, some users find a learning curve in the initial setup and mention the need for time investment to customize and leverage Grafana effectively. There are also calls for clearer documentation and simplification of notification alert templates.
In summary, Grafana is a comprehensive solution for data visualization and monitoring, widely used across industries for its versatility, ease of use, and extensive integration options. It suits organizations seeking a customizable and scalable platform for visualizing time-series data from diverse sources. However, users should be prepared for some complexity in setup and customization and may need to invest time in learning and tailoring the system to their specific needs.
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