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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
28th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (26th), Cloud Monitoring Software (16th)
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 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 6.4% 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%
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.
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

"Offers a valuable logging transport feature"
"It has reduced the amount of time that we would take for troubleshooting."
"It has really been helpful in detecting, identifying, and troubleshooting issues with cloud services used in the organization."
"We find the solution to be stable."
"The solution has improved our organization by reducing latency and also monitoring the costs of GCP usage by using the logging and monitoring features."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the multi-cloud integration, where there is support for both GCP and AWS."
"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."
"Grafana has helped our organization with observability and operational excellence."
"It integrates well with other solutions."
"The features I appreciate most are the dashboards and the integrations with multiple data sources."
"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"It excels in providing comprehensive details when there are downtimes or fluctuations, offering thorough reports."
"Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable."
"Grafana has positively impacted our organization by democratizing data within our company."
 

Cons

"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."
"Lacking sufficient operations documentation."
"It is difficult to estimate in advance how much something is going to cost."
"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."
"The process of logging analytics can be improved"
"The product provides minimal metrics that are insufficient."
"While we are satisfied with the overall performance, in certain cases we must add additional metrics and additional tools like Grafana and Dynatrace."
"It would be helpful if they simplified the data source."
"The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs."
"Its UI features to create charts can also be improved. Some features could have a link to the documentation."
"Perhaps the display of the trigger limits should be more efficient because it's difficult to see that in a graph."
"In the area of documentation, they must do a better job."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"There is room for improvement when using multiple dashboards because they can become complicated to keep track of and use."
"The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."
"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."
"The cost could be lower."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"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."
"The solution is expensive."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"We are using the open-source license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
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
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
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: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.