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Grafana vs ServiceNow Cloud Observability 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

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
ServiceNow Cloud Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
41st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
5
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 Grafana is 2.6%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is 0.7%, up from 0.4% 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%
ServiceNow Cloud Observability0.7%
Other96.7%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Uday-Thentu - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Automation has reduced incident impact and is driving proactive self‑healing across hybrid services
ServiceNow Cloud Observability's valuable features include AI agents that can be integrated and triggered with workflows for evaluating and taking the right action in both process and technical aspects. On the process side, it ensures the right approvals are triggered. From the technical aspect, it allows integration for taking relevant action without human intervention, moving towards self-healing. The main benefit of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is real-time data, which helps us move from being reactive to more proactive. By defining and fine-tuning workflows, we were able to implement timely notification and auto-action or auto-remediations. At the same time, if anything involves additional cost or requires intervention, it helps trigger approval notifications, and once approval is received, it timely takes the action. The AI agents help define and fine-tune those workflows further.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The dashboards are very easy to work with."
"The integration between Loki and Tempo is valuable."
"I find Grafana beneficial due to its numerous plugins."
"If you want a scalable solution, better visualization, optimization, centralized monitoring, and improved troubleshooting, then you can choose Grafana without any doubts in your mind."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"It is easy to change and move virtual servers."
"It integrates well with other solutions."
"It excels in providing comprehensive details when there are downtimes or fluctuations, offering thorough reports."
"The UI is very intuitive."
"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."
"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."
"The main benefit of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is real-time data, which helps us move from being reactive to more proactive."
"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."
 

Cons

"I find that the alerting UI in Grafana can be complex for new users."
"Trigger limits are difficult to see in a graph."
"Grafana could improve by having its own query language. Currently, it uses languages like Prometheus or InfluxDB, which not everyone knows. Their query language should be easier."
"There is a need for improvement in automating daily monitoring reports, especially when alerts are triggered due to system downtimes or fluctuations."
"The formatting could be better."
"Lacks event management which affects our DevOps people."
"The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk."
"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."
"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."
"The cost could be reduced or lightweight agents and lightweight modules could be introduced, which would make it much easier to implement."
"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."
"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"​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."
"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."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Construction Company
10%
Retailer
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise27
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What needs improvement with LightStep?
The cost could be reduced or lightweight agents and lightweight modules could be introduced, which would make it much easier to implement.
What is your primary use case for LightStep?
ServiceNow Cloud Observability's main use case is end-to-end automation starting from the trigger in the cloud. Currently, it focuses more on self-healing and understanding the complete uptime of e...
What advice do you have for others considering LightStep?
Regarding security, I unfortunately do not have much hands-on experience. My focus has been majorly on self-healing activities, but given what I have observed, it does provide a good opportunity in...
 

Also Known As

No data available
LightStep
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,
Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana vs. ServiceNow Cloud Observability and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.