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Grafana vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
4.8
Grafana improves data visualization, enhances operations, reduces AWS costs by 15%, and improves mean time to detect by 25%.
Sentiment score
6.5
Splunk Observability Cloud boosts efficiency, reduces costs, and enhances productivity with centralized tools and improved monitoring capabilities.
I identified over-provisioned servers and reduced my AWS monthly bill by 15%, which is a significant saving in terms of costs.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
We have saved considerable amounts of money, reducing our expenditures from around three to four crores to approximately one to one point two crores.
Senior Manager at Agriculture Skill Council of India
We have been able to save a great deal of money, and our profits have increased by twenty percent.
Project Manager at AGRICULTURE SKILL COUNCIL OF INDIA (ASCI)
Using Splunk has saved my organization about 30% of our budget compared to using multiple different monitoring products.
Senior Manager at Bank of America
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Grafana's efficient customer service and strong open-source community provide valuable support and resources for technical issues.
Sentiment score
7.2
Splunk Observability Cloud's customer service is highly rated for its responsiveness, support, and effective issue resolution.
The technical support team is very helpful with complex PromQL troubleshooting.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
My advice for people who are new to Grafana or considering it is to reach out to the community mainly, as that's the primary benefit of Grafana.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I do not use Grafana's support for technical issues because I have found solutions on Stack Overflow and ChatGPT helps me as well.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
On a scale of 1 to 10, the customer service and technical support deserve a 10.
Systems Administrator at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
They have consistently helped us resolve any issues we've encountered.
Software Engineer at UKG
The customer support system is the foundational pillar of any successful business.
Project Manager at AGRICULTURE SKILL COUNCIL OF INDIA (ASCI)
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.0
Grafana provides scalable solutions for visualization, though complexity and costs vary with deployment size and infrastructure needs.
Sentiment score
6.9
Splunk Observability Cloud is scalable and flexible but can incur high costs; management of custom metrics may be challenging.
It is highly scalable and built on a big data architecture capable of ingesting trillions of data points.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
In terms of our company, the infrastructure is using two availability zones in AWS.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
We've used the solution across more than 250 people, including engineers.
Splunk Observability Expert
As we are a growing company transitioning all our applications to the cloud, and with the increasing number of cloud-native applications, Splunk Observability Cloud will help us achieve digital resiliency and reduce our mean time to resolution.
Application Developer at UMB Financial
We have never seen any kind of downtime or crashes, as it has been absolutely very easy to scale.
Project Manager at AGRICULTURE SKILL COUNCIL OF INDIA (ASCI)
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Grafana is stable and reliable with minor issues; performance varies based on resource configuration and architectural factors.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk Observability Cloud is stable, reliable, and scalable, with minor performance issues and occasional but limited downtime.
When something in their dashboard does not work, because it is open source, I am able to find all the relative combinations that people are having, making it much easier for me to fix.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
Once you get to a higher load, you need to re-evaluate your architecture and put that into account.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Even when handling millions of data points, the visualization layer remains responsive.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
When downtime occurs, it raises concerns about how we measure and receive alerts, as everything needs to be in place.
Aws Dev Ops Engineer at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Splunk Observability Cloud is very stable.
Software Engineer at Titans Lab
It is highly scalable because it can handle approximately up to one hundred applications at a time without any lapse or lag.
Project Manager at AGRICULTURE SKILL COUNCIL OF INDIA (ASCI)
 

Room For Improvement

Grafana users seek enhanced dashboard usability, AI features, integration ease, user interface, flexible licensing, and better security and compatibility.
Splunk Observability Cloud needs better cost transparency, user interface, third-party integration, and improved setup, onboarding, and AI capabilities.
It would be better if they made the technology easy to use without needing to read extensive documentation.
AWS Cloud Re-Start Program Specialist at Orange RDC (Congo)
Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs.
BI and Analytics Engineer at Sandvine Inc
I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following different requests between different services could be more powerful.
Director of Engineering at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
The out-of-the-box customizable dashboards in Splunk Observability Cloud are very effective in showcasing IT performance to business leaders.
IT Operations Engineer at ABC Supply Co. Inc.
The next release of Splunk Observability Cloud should include a feature that makes it so that when looking at charts and dashboards, and also looking at one environment regardless of the product feature that you're in, APM, infrastructure, RUM, the environment that is chosen in the first location when you sign into Splunk Observability Cloud needs to stay persistent all the way through.
Systems Monitoring Engineer II at a government with 10,001+ employees
There should be a solution to update OTeL agents from Splunk Observability Cloud itself.
Senior Software Engineer at WorldPay US
 

Setup Cost

Grafana provides flexible pricing, from a free version to paid tiers, appealing to varied enterprise needs and scalable deployments.
Enterprise users find Splunk Observability Cloud pricey compared to competitors, but negotiations can reduce costs by 10-15%.
In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
Aplication Architect at Amazon
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.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
I purchased my Grafana Cloud subscription through the AWS Marketplace, which simplified my procurement process and allowed me to apply the cost towards my AWS committed spend.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Splunk is a bit expensive since it charges based on the indexing rate of data.
Senior Manager at Bank of America
It is expensive, especially when there are other vendors that offer something similar for much cheaper.
Solutions Architect at Ikusi
I can confidently say our availability improved by forty percent, and downtime was reduced by approximately seventy to eighty percent.
Splunk Engineer at Data Elicit Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
 

Valuable Features

Grafana is praised for its customizable dashboards, integration, real-time monitoring, open-source nature, and broad community support.
Splunk Observability Cloud offers real-time monitoring, AI analytics, and easy integration, enhancing user experience and operational performance.
Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data.
Aplication Architect at Amazon
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.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
You can check those metrics in the incident management tool by filtering the alert source as Grafana, and it helps in reducing production incidents because you can acknowledge and visualize the metrics from Grafana on time.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
Splunk provides advanced notifications of roadblocks in the application, which helps us to improve and avoid impacts during high-volume days.
Senior Manager at Bank of America
For troubleshooting, we can detect problems in seconds, which is particularly helpful for digital teams.
Splunk Observability Expert
It offers unified visibility for logs, metrics, and traces.
Administrator at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

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
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (7th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (5th), Container Management (6th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (3rd)
 

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 Splunk Observability Cloud is 2.3%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Splunk Observability Cloud2.3%
Grafana2.6%
Other95.1%
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.
PK
Project Manager at AGRICULTURE SKILL COUNCIL OF INDIA (ASCI)
Unified observability has improved real-time governance and now drives data-led decisions
Log Observer Connect is embedded here, but we are facing some delays in centralized log collection and analysis, which can be further fastened. We are collecting all the data metrics and decision-making insights, but all these data-driven decisions coming from different applications are not connected somewhere. A consolidated form or correlation of these insights is not happening between each other due to which we feel we are missing something significant. Some generalized feedback includes that predictive alerts or alarms which can be integrated with AI-driven alarms and alerting features should be established so that there is AI-driven intelligence and anomaly detection happening with a complete systematic process in service delivery. Application dependencies are huge, and business and operational dashboards should be improved. Right now there are very interactive custom dashboards, and every now and then, the personalization of enhancements keeps happening. KPI monitoring, executive reporting, and analytics have definitely been introduced to a great extent. There are few things in cloud-native monitoring, such as integration with AWS and Azure, where we sometimes do face lags. Those things can definitely be improved upon. I have used Datadog and Dynatrace before using Splunk Observability Cloud. Datadog was definitely recommended by most of our peers because of its very strong comprehensive observability and very strong and unique dashboard systems. Dynatrace was also very good because they have offered a lot of AI-driven analysis methods and processes, which was helping our organization a lot. Since our organization has a very strong IT ecosystem for agriculture, very different kinds of customized things are required.
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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
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise27
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise55
 

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 SignalFx?
Regarding dashboard customization, while Splunk has many dashboard building options, customers sometimes need to create specific dashboards, particularly for applicative metrics such as Java and pr...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The solution involves observability in general, such as Application Performance Monitoring, and generally addresses digital applications, web applications, sites, and mobile applications. I worked ...
What advice do you have for others considering SignalFx?
We're a customer and end-user. Currently, in France, we cannot use the artificial intelligence option. While this option is enabled for the United States and many countries, it's not yet available ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM), Splunk Synthetic Monitoring
 

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.
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana vs. Splunk Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.