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CA App Synthetic Monitor vs Grafana comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CA App Synthetic Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
73rd
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of CA App Synthetic Monitor is 0.5%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 2.6%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Grafana2.6%
CA App Synthetic Monitor0.5%
Other96.9%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2286675 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
A reliable solution for SSL offloading and to encrypt outside traffic
If you are responsible for monitoring the logs in F5, it isn't very easy. The format is complicated compared to different vendors. For example, Fortinet and Cisco have feasible formats for sending and fetching logs. Suppose I'm monitoring the logs and everything, and when I am retrieving logs from F5, I want to know whether it is regular traffic or any abnormality is happening. The logs itself is not user-friendly. It may not give you a clear way of what's happening. You have to go through different websites and work on it. You have to waste so much time on it.
Vitthal Gole - PeerSpot reviewer
Devops Engineer at AIQOD
Proactive monitoring has transformed how our teams detect issues and resolve incidents faster
For improving Grafana, the alert configuration could be more intuitive for new users. Dashboard management becomes complex in large environments. So if we have multiple environments and we have to manage our dashboards for them, sometimes it becomes complicated to manage all the dashboards. The learning curve is steep for beginners. More built-in reporting and analytics features would be helpful. Documentation for advanced features could be more detailed. Role-based access management could be simpler to configure. Performance could be optimized for very large dashboards with high cardinality data sources. Grafana could improve its alert configuration workflow and make advanced dashboard management easier for new users. More built-in reporting features would also be beneficial. A simpler onboarding experience for first-time users and more built-in dashboard templates for common monitoring scenarios would be helpful. Grafana is a powerful monitoring platform, but it could improve dashboard organization in large environments, simplify alert management, provide more built-in reporting capabilities, enhance plugin compatibility during upgrades, and offer better AI-driven insights for fast root cause analysis. For example, if we are hitting a CPU metric of ninety to ninety-five percent or a system load of seventy to eighty percent, we have to act on that. But if Grafana suggests something on that metric, such as an AI suggestion, it would be more helpful. We could get an idea of how to solve that issue. For the Grafana dashboards, they could provide more built-in compliance and audit reporting, enhance AI recommendations with clearer explanations of why an issue was flagged, enhance accessibility and keyboard navigation, add more native integrations with emerging cloud and DevOps tools, and improve scalability for very large enterprise deployments. Grafana is a mature platform, but it could benefit from better dashboard version control, simpler environment migration, enhanced AI explanations, more built-in reporting, and improved performance for large-scale deployments with complex dashboards.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"From our experience, it really helps managers in measuring application SLAs and viewing historical performance data."
"Each had strengths in one area or another, but CA covered the majority of our needs end-to-end."
"Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable."
"The main benefits I have seen from using Grafana in my day-to-day activities is the visualization of the metrics, specifically Dora Metrics."
"The integration between Loki and Tempo is valuable."
"It is a stable, reliable product."
"Collaboration: Shares data and dashboards across teams."
"Grafana has delivered a strong return on investment by reducing troubleshooting time, improving incident response, and minimizing manual monitoring efforts through centralized dashboards and automated alerts."
"Grafana's best features are live monitoring and alerts."
"Grafana is a very scalable product. It's a really good product."
 

Cons

"The RBMS component is limited as you can only record using Internet Explorer."
"Pricing makes little sense. We had examples where it would be cheaper to have two basic accounts than one intermediate."
"More dashboard is required, out-of-the-box, for OpenNMS."
"They should improve the functioning of its editing tool."
"The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk."
"Setting up alerts via Grafana is a bit complicated, and alerting needs to improve."
"The service dashboard is very hard and needs improvement."
"Multiple dashboards combined into one dashboard has slowed things down for us."
"The features are complicated and not intuitive."
"It is limited on the reporting type supported, which is important for managerial-level officers who want reports that are either general or specific."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I am using an open-source version"
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"The solution is expensive."
"For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"We are using the open-source license."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very reasonable and has excellent community support.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
Currently, I do not think that any improvement is required, but there are multiple use cases.
What is your primary use case for Grafana?
My main use case for Grafana is to create and design dashboards based on the metrics provided by different exporters via Prometheus. We have different exporters, and we are creating different dashb...
 

Also Known As

CA ASM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Lexmark
Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about CA App Synthetic Monitor vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.