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DX SaaS 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

DX SaaS
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
70th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (17th)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of DX SaaS is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 5.2%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Grafana5.2%
DX SaaS0.3%
Other94.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

JM
It's highly customizable but lacks many features of available in competing solutions
DX SaaS is a latecomer to the APM market. Some things that are straightforward in Dynatrace are complicated in DX. For example, upgrading the agents is a seamless process in Dynatrace, but it's a pain in DX SaaS. You should be able to upgrade in the Application Command Center. However, it is not working correctly. They upgrade the product every 15 to 30 days, and the process isn't seamless. It's like implementing the solution all over again. We monitor around 1,000-plus applications and have more than 100,000 agents, so we require a smooth upgrade process. It's nearly impossible to stay updated on the latest version. Upgrading the Dynatrace agent is smoother. You don't need to worry about it. If the agent is on the Dynatrace server, you only need to push it. After that, you will be notified to reboot the APM or CLM. That's it. It took us three years to deploy the agent on 1,000-plus applications across 40,000-plus servers. Now, they are saying they are ending support for 7.0.49, and we need to upgrade. The path to upgrading isn't straightforward. The first process is manual, and we can push it to different servers so it is visible. What's our configuration? Who is going to do the configuration? It's not typical or practical. I don't understand how product teams don't see that. That feature is not there. We hope they add this feature to the new product called DX Platform, which consists of net apps. All those network monitoring tools will be combined into DX Platform. All the monitoring functionality is moved to DX Platform. You can't see a trend of your metrics grouped according to the last month, six months, one year, etc. The resolution is not there. I want granular visibility into data captured in the last 15 seconds. Those are essential features. I am not saying that DX lacks solid features, but they need to consider it. Some core functionality of the product is missing. We have around 50-plus requests to add previously available features in the on-premise version. That is one reason application teams are reluctant to go to DX SaaS. We are struggling to make them understand and trying to find alternatives for the existing features. We've had many discussions with the product team, telling them we need this functionality. However, they tell us it's not on their product roadmap. They are gradually adding other features, but we need our requirements to be a priority. You cannot say you will try to add those requested features that aren't on your product roadmap. There is always a catch in the product. We use around 10 tenants in production and six in the test run. First of all, there is nothing in the pane. If we are trying to see the data from an application, how do we know which tenant and application are reporting? There was a feature called Enterprise Team Center, but that functionality has been removed. All the applications are connected to the manager, which is connected to ETC. If you go to ETC, you can find the server and see your data, but that functionality was not there. Every product should have a management feature, but that is missing, and they are saying that it is not there in the roadmap. It is a basic requirement. You need to understand that. That is not there, manager, and they are saying that is not there in the roadmap as well. They have created a new tenant page temporarily. It is not there currently. It is not a required thing. There is a feature called Domain, but that concept is gone. We've struggled a lot, and what they provided in the initial migration stage is no longer working. We were delayed for two months because we didn't give them the correct input. They don't know their product. We tell them there is a problem, and they say they're fixing it. Are we their Guinea pig? You cannot treat your customers like this.
Julian-Lewis - PeerSpot reviewer
Has provided real-time views and integrated insights across diverse data sources
The most valuable feature is Grafana's ability to plug in data or events and monitoring data from any kind of source. The graphing capability is what I use the most. I have made use of Grafana's customizable dashboards and templating features. These features have enhanced my data visualization and analytical processes by enabling me to give real-time views to our end-users of what they're doing or what their service is doing. The historical and trend data allow people to pull up data from Grafana and from whatever source to display it and examine how an environment is being used. I have employed real-time metric visualization capabilities for monitoring and real-time views. These dashboards can also be used as historical views, pulling out more data. The effectiveness of Grafana in delivering real-time notifications through its alerting system is quite good. The widgets are able to highlight errors if they happen in real-time on the dashboard. The alerting functionality is improving. I generally tend to use the monitoring tool for alerting rather than Grafana, but I have had to use Grafana occasionally without any issues.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Actionable insight is the most valuable feature."
"DX allows you to customize and gives you a high degree of control."
"It supports numerous platforms."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."
"Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for viewing infrastructure metrics through dashboards."
"It gives us the visibility we need. I like that when we add deployment markers or release markers, we know exactly when an issue arises. For instance, if there is an increased usage of CPU, we can link it directly to the deployment that might have caused the issue. It increases productivity and observability. We can now easily tell when a certain issue arises. It's way easier to debug because it can point you to certain things based on these markers, and we can debug easier."
"The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
"The solution can scale well."
"Plugin: Connecting Grafana to multiple APIs of leading monitoring tools and alerting tools."
"Grafana saves us hours compared to DataDog."
"There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful."
 

Cons

"DX SaaS is a latecomer to the APM market. Some things that are straightforward in Dynatrace are complicated in DX. For example, upgrading the agents is a seamless process in Dynatrace, but it's a pain in DX SaaS. You should be able to upgrade in the Application Command Center. However, it is not working correctly."
"Old user interface and dashboards could be improved."
"The ability to scale presents a challenge as the cost of handling vast amounts of data in the cloud must be taken into account."
"I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation."
"More dashboard is required, out-of-the-box, for OpenNMS."
"The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs."
"It is limited on the reporting type supported, which is important for managerial-level officers who want reports that are either general or specific."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"Its interface could be more accessible."
"Regarding joining between queries, merging between two queries that give the same information could be simple, and there are some ways to do that, but if there was something even easier, it would be great."
"I would give it a ten if it were much simpler for users who just want to get a simple objective in Grafana and are not experienced with technical configuration."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our monthly cost for DX SaaS is approximately $5 per user, which I considered affordable."
"I am using an open-source version"
"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."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"The solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Legal Firm
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Grafana?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
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. That is pretty much great for us.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
Grafana could be improved through enhancement of graphs and visualizations and providing more integrations. Grafana is going to start working with OpenTelemetry, which would be helpful to have the ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

CA DXI, CA Digital Experience Insights
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CNN
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 DX SaaS vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.