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Grafana vs Splunk Observability Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 6, 2025

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
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk Observability Cloud
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (9th), Cloud Monitoring Software (9th), Container Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Grafana is 6.4%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk Observability Cloud is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Vikash-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Displays data visually from multiple sources while integrating seamlessly with existing systems
Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for viewing infrastructure metrics through dashboards. It integrates with Prometheus to pull data and offers a straightforward setup process. Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data. Grafana's integration capability is straightforward, which facilitates building dashboards as needed.
Lakshmi Padaga - PeerSpot reviewer
Collaborates performance metrics with log data to pinpoint the exact cause of issues and offers error detection
Splunk APM is a robust tool with many capabilities. There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience. For Splunk APM, there could be simplified navigation, like streamlining the user interface to make navigation more intuitive for our users, especially those new to APM, which can enhance usability. We can provide more customization options for dashboards and visualizations to help users tailor the platform to their specific needs. There could be more integration capabilities with a wider range of third-party tools and platforms would also be beneficial. By focusing on these areas, Splunk APM can enhance its value proposition, improve user satisfaction, and better meet the evolving needs of organizations monitoring their application performance.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Great capacity planning and the solution has a great GUI."
"The integration between Loki and Tempo is valuable."
"The best feature was the creation of graphs and trends."
"It excels in providing comprehensive details when there are downtimes or fluctuations, offering thorough reports."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"Grafana is stable and has great engineers."
"I find Grafana beneficial due to its numerous plugins."
"It integrates well with other solutions."
"Splunk APM has helped us to standardize logging and monitoring procedures."
"The initial setup was straightforward. We didn't find it to be too complex."
"It can monitor, get the data, and then report on the data."
"The most valuable features are troubleshooting and optimizing application performance."
"Splunk APM helps us to find errors immediately and resolve them."
"The data collection from our VMs, containers, databases, and backend components is valuable."
"It is very easy to monitor multiple cloud environments. It's like a single pane of glass for us. We can use it to monitor our on-prem and both of our cloud environments as opposed to having different tools for each environment. It makes it all come together in one tool."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring gives us complete visibility without the need for storage."
 

Cons

"The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk."
"The service dashboard is very hard and needs improvement."
"It would be helpful if they simplified the data source."
"Its UI features to create charts can also be improved. Some features could have a link to the documentation."
"It is limited on the reporting type supported, which is important for managerial-level officers who want reports that are either general or specific."
"Multiple dashboards combined into one dashboard has slowed things down for us."
"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
"They should improve the functioning of its editing tool."
"Splunk's functionality could be improved by adding database connectors for other platforms like AWS and Azure."
"The licensing model is expensive. We need to monitor the amount of data ingested because the cost is based on the data collected."
"There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience."
"I've been using the Splunk query language, and it can be a bit time-consuming to set up the queries I need."
"It's a bit difficult to use. It takes some time to get into it and to get it to do what you would like it to do. It is not straightforward to use it."
"Splunk would be better if some tools were integrated to be able to take action on security or network concerns."
"The security could be better."
"The clustering part of indexes can be more refined."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"It's free of cost; it operates as an open-source tool."
"The solution is expensive."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"I am not in that circle, but we are currently licensing based on our queries. That is working out for us. Previously, it was by volume of data, and now, we can store as much data as we want."
"This is an expensive solution."
"It is expensive."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"It appears to be expensive compared to competitors."
"The pricing is based on several factors, including the scale of deployment."
"Licensing cost is the biggest argument I get from those divesting from Splunk. There are those within our organization who say we are going to go to other tools since Splunk is too expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Grafana?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
I used the open-source version for my learning, which was free. In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs. I think predictive capabilities in ...
What do you like most about SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available. We sometimes encountered issues in setting up alerts. The custom detector could be m...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The main purpose of using Splunk APM is to optimize our application. We use Splunk APM primarily to understand how the application works, how it uses resources, and its response time in connection ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Splunk Infrastructure 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: April 2025.
845,589 professionals have used our research since 2012.