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Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs Grafana comparison

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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
32nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (24th), Cloud Monitoring Software (19th)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
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 November 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 2.3%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Grafana2.3%
Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)0.9%
Other96.8%
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.
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

"It's easy to use."
"I would tell potential users that the current version is much nicer than the previous one."
"The cloud login enables us to get our logs from the different platforms that we currently use."
"We find the solution to be stable."
"Offers a valuable logging transport feature"
"Provides visibility into the performance uptime."
"I like the monitoring feature."
"The solution has improved our organization by reducing latency and also monitoring the costs of GCP usage by using the logging and monitoring features."
"Grafana is stable and has great engineers."
"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."
"The solution has improved our organization by providing a centralized way to instantly see our business, technical, and service metrics."
"Grafana has helped our organization with observability and operational excellence."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"It provides a graphical representation and it's clear to see what's happening."
"The solution has good features."
"The features I appreciate most are the dashboards and the integrations with multiple data sources."
 

Cons

"Lacking sufficient operations documentation."
"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."
"Operations documentation could be a bit better. It took us some time to get up and running with it."
"If I want to track any round-trip or breakdowns of my response times, I'm not able to get it."
"While we are satisfied with the overall performance, in certain cases we must add additional metrics and additional tools like Grafana and Dynatrace."
"The process of logging analytics can be improved"
"It could be more stable."
"It could be even more automated."
"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"Writing queries can be a bit difficult because the syntax must be maintained."
"It's difficult to see the trends on the graph when the range is too long."
"The interface is not well-liked by my customers."
"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."
"We need different kinds of applications in our infrastructure to see information in Grafana."
"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."
"There are not a lot of plugins for financial market monitoring."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost could be lower."
"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."
"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"I am using an open-source version"
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"We are using the open-source license."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
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 Business15
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?
We are using the community edition. We have used the community edition, the open-source edition. So, there were no licensing costs. The setup was straightforward, and the main investment was the ti...
What needs improvement with Grafana?
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 ...
What is your primary use case for Grafana?
The main use case for Grafana is that we are using Prometheus to collect the metrics, and primarily use Grafana for infrastructure and application monitoring. It helps me visualize system metrics t...
 

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: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.