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Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) 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

Google Cloud's operations s...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
25th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (24th), Cloud Monitoring Software (15th)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is 0.9%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 2.6%, down from 6.7% 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%
Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)0.9%
Other96.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Architect at T-Systems International GmbH
Offers reliable Ops Agent and logging transport feature with easy third-party integrations
As part of our company, we implemented several changes in our log analytics pattern, including the storage and procurement process. Earlier, before implementing the solution, our company was able to procure only one year of data, but later, we came to the three-year mark. Around 15-20% reduction has been witnessed in the total analytic consumption of our company. The aforementioned result was possible because the solution allowed the creation of a dashboard where factors like storage costs, proportion of logs, and logs presence in a storage bucket or Big Query can all be checked. Earlier all logs were stored in a raw storage, but currently our company is able to move logs in table bucket that contributes towards cost savings. It has default integration for all gcp services. recently managed Prometheus support gives more flexibility to organizations to remain connected with their current Prometheus setup. We leveraged integrated FinOps Hub for recommendations for our workloads and server configurations, helpd us lot in order to get maximum TCO.
BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Unified dashboards have empowered teams and have democratized real-time operational insights
Grafana's snapshot and dashboard sharing features are critical for our remote incident response. During production issues, I generate a public snapshot of a dashboard at a specific point and share the URL in our Slack war room so every engineer can see exactly what the metrics looked like when the error occurred. This helps significantly during the process of finding the root cause in those scenarios. The best features Grafana offers go beyond just pretty charts; it is an integration engine. 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. My team uses this feature by comparing two different tables from the databases to show one single view, which Grafana is really helping with. In a visualized way, the charts can be displayed on one dashboard, allowing end users who are not familiar with these technical aspects to extract valuable data from it. Grafana has positively impacted our organization by democratizing data within our company. Before using Grafana, only developers could see the system health, but now our product managers and executives have their own high-level dashboards, which has improved cross-departmental transparency and alignment.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The cloud login enables us to get our logs from the different platforms that we currently use."
"The most valuable feature is the multi-cloud integration, where there is support for both GCP and AWS."
"It has really been helpful in detecting, identifying, and troubleshooting issues with cloud services used in the organization."
"Our company has a corporate account for Google Cloud and so our systems and clusters integrate really well."
"It's easy to use."
"We find the solution to be stable."
"Google Stackdriver is all about activity."
"I like the monitoring feature."
"The solution is adaptable, easy to use, and works well for microservices development."
"Kubernetes could help us to better visualize the trend of our data by recording and displaying our history over a chosen duration, such as the last 30 days."
"Grafana's built-in integration with third-party tools, databases, and MQs is an amazing feature."
"The solution can scale well."
"What I found most valuable in Grafana is that it has a lot of integrations and features that I need for data processing and visualization."
"It is a stable, reliable product."
"The dashboards are very easy to work with."
"Visualisation: It is easy to create beautiful, understanding graphs, snapshots to share the graphs with people who do not have access to Grafana, and templating to create powerful graphs."
 

Cons

"While we are satisfied with the overall performance, in certain cases we must add additional metrics and additional tools like Grafana and Dynatrace."
"If I want to track any round-trip or breakdowns of my response times, I'm not able to get it. My request goes through various levels of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and comes back to my client machine. Suppose that my request has taken 10 seconds overall, so if I want to break it down, to see where the delay is happening within my architecture, I am not able to find that out using Stackdriver."
"Lacking sufficient operations documentation."
"The process of logging analytics can be improved"
"If I want to track any round-trip or breakdowns of my response times, I'm not able to get it."
"Operations documentation could be a bit better. It took us some time to get up and running with it."
"It is difficult to estimate in advance how much something is going to cost."
"Google Stackdriver is a stable product, but there is some lagging we cannot stop."
"I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation."
"It would be helpful if Grafana provided more information and training on how to use Prometheus."
"I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on; we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"The look and feel of the charting and graph capabilities in Grafana could improve. If they provided a storyboard type of feature as they have in other solutions, such as PowerBI. The multi-tenanted and stitch metrics features could improve."
"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 look and feel of the charting and graph capabilities in Grafana could improve."
"One area for improvement in Grafana is that depending on your version, you have to pay for the features, making the license expensive. It would be great if the licensing model could be more flexible. In the next release of Grafana, I want cluster creation to be available, which would help in Grafana deployment and scaling. Currently, the scaling process for the solution is a bit complicated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."
"The cost could be lower."
"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."
"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
"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."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"I am using an open-source version"
"The solution is expensive."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"We are using the open-source license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Stackdriver?
As Ops Suite, is a google product which effectively comes at zero setup cost, in order to manage your on-premises logs on onsite, it involves negligible cost for using ops agent and it also include...
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

Google Stackdriver, Stackdriver, Stackdriver Monitoring, Stackdriver Logging, Google Cloud Monitoring
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uber, Batterii, Q42, Dovetail Games
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 Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.