The solution is used for monitoring the live monitoring of our load test.
Senior Specialist at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The solution has a good UI dashboard, is easy to deploy, and is easy to monitor data
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."
- "I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data.
What needs improvement?
The solution's integration with other tools needs improvement.
I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for over three years.
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January 2026
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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We currently have over 50 people using the solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment usually takes one and a half hours.
What other advice do I have?
I give the solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Associate at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
A good starting point for SRE but managing defects is difficult without granular details
Pros and Cons
- "Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
- "Writing queries can be a bit difficult because the syntax must be maintained."
What is our primary use case?
Our company uses the solution as a monitoring tool that provides alerts and behavior information. We have many Spring Boot applications and the solution works well with them.
What is most valuable?
The solution is adaptable, easy to use, and works well for microservices development.
Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model.
What needs improvement?
It is difficult to manage defects because the solution does not provide granular details about the internal system for tracing.
Writing queries can be a bit difficult because the syntax must be maintained. The dependency on syntax should be removed so that it does not matter for queries.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution has some stability issues because I don't always see proper results. In comparison to other tools, it is not the most stable when using extensive SRE techniques.
Dynatrace and ELK are more stable but are more costly. An organization that needs strong stability and has a bigger budget could consider these tools.
Stability, features, or quality should not be based on cost. It is important to compare SRE models to find the best for your environment.
How are customer service and support?
I have never needed technical support.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is easy for on-premises. You install, integrate, and immediately see the visualization.
I am not sure about the ease of cloud or enterprise-level setups.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented the solution in-house.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I use the open source model so it is free.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
In the SRE model, there are many tools evolving but the solution is a good starting point for SRE with Spring Boot. Once you become familiar with SRE and are clear about the terminology, you can explore other products. Other users will say ELK or Dynatrace are good, but the best solution depends on your requirements.
SRE is a journey that is uncovered as you progress. The solution is adaptable, easy to configure, works for microservices development, and integrates with Spring Boot so it is the best product for starting points.
What other advice do I have?
The solution is a visualization tool that is pretty easy to use. Writing queries can be difficult so it is important to learn how to integrate with data sources before you write queries to visualize those metrics.
I rate the solution a six out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Buyer's Guide
Grafana
January 2026
Learn what your peers think about Grafana. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Engineering Manager at a wellness & fitness company with 501-1,000 employees
You can create dashboards to instantly see your business, technical, and service metrics
Pros and Cons
- "The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
- "The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
What is our primary use case?
The primary use case of the solution is to create business and technical dashboards in the metrics provided by the services through Prometheus.
How has it helped my organization?
The solution has improved our organization by providing a centralized way to instantly see our business, technical, and service metrics.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features are the user-friendly interface and the ability to connect with many data sets.
What needs improvement?
The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is scalable.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously we used New Relic before switching to the solution.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud.
What about the implementation team?
The solution was implemented in-house with a few clicks.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment.
What other advice do I have?
I give the solution an eight out of ten.
There are 40 people using the solution in our organization and it requires three people to maintain it.
I would recommend you try to use as many tools as you can. You can have an ecosystem that is quiet and works like using Temple, Prometheus, and so on.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Technical Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Helps us to monitor our traffic, but there are limited options
Pros and Cons
- "The best feature was the creation of graphs and trends."
- "If there was an issue on one node, we couldn't drill down and see all the issues on other nodes."
What is our primary use case?
We used Grafana to monitor our traffic.
What is most valuable?
The best feature was the creation of graphs and trends to know if the traffic was low or okay. We could create week-over-week traffic and trend analysis as well. All these features were good and were the only features I used.
What needs improvement?
If there was an issue on one node, we couldn't drill down and see all the issues on other nodes or see if there were interlinked issues. However, Datadog allowed us to do this. In Datadog, we could take our complete environment and see what nodes went down simultaneously and the cause. For example, Datadog allows you to see in the graphs whether the database is locked or if there was a firewall issue. However, in Grafana, we had to add everything into a single dashboard manually.
In the next release, there should be more of a colour palette. The colour palette in Grafana is limited, and it chooses its own. We used hundreds of services to monitor into a single graph, so in the stacked chart, it chose the colour needs, and when we wanted to change it, there were only four or five options.
For how long have I used the solution?
I used this solution when I worked for Expedia. We used the solution for about three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
There were no breakdowns or hiccups.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I am unaware of the scalability. There were around 500 users when I worked there. The network team was using it on a large scale.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I don't believe that Grafana fulfilled the requirements completely. That's why we moved to Datadog.
How was the initial setup?
I was not involved in the initial setup. We had a password issue at a point, but I am unsure if that was an issue with the solution or just within the organization.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Grafana was not an open source, and we had to pay for a license to use it. The same was the case with CashPoint. There was a license, but I'm unaware of how much we were paying.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I believe my old company chose Grafana because they initially wanted to monitor the traffic and know the firewall and scaling.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Grafana a six out of ten because Grafana has limited options compared to Datadog. Regarding advice, it was pretty simple to use Grafana. The trickiest part was creating a new dashboard, working on the query and adding the requirement. So you have to have the source and path handy to put that in the query. Any user can use Grafana once they understand what the dashboards are doing and what data is being searched from those dashboards.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
System Administrator at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
Customizable, flexible, open source dashboarding tool supporting a lot of data sources
Pros and Cons
- "Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable."
- "It is limited on the reporting type supported, which is important for managerial-level officers who want reports that are either general or specific."
What is our primary use case?
We use Grafana to visualize IT infrastructure monitoring data. We have real-time, historical, and trend data that we can visualize in a flexible manner using Grafana. We use Zabbix to collect, process, and store the data. Zabbix has its own inbuilt visualization widgets, dashboards, and graphs, however, Grafana adds more flexibility. We have integrated Zabbix with Grafana using the Zabbix API which gives access to almost all components of the Zabbix Software.
Our environment is on-premises so we have both Zabbix and Grafana locally installed.
How has it helped my organization?
Grafana has greatly improved the way we visualize monitoring data. Now, every team member from directors, managers, sales representatives, to technical engineers can be granted access to custom dashboards relevant to their line of work.
With the latest Grafana versions, reports can be generated from dashboards to update senior management officers.
The dashboards are not only intuitive and insightful, but they are also beautiful so it makes monitoring and data visualization more enjoyable.
Since it can easily be integrated with other software, having that important part of data processing taken care of makes technical teams more focused on improving data sources and enriching the data.
What is most valuable?
The ability to create almost all kinds of graphs and visualize any kind of information in an appealing way is extremely useful to us.
The customizability of dashboards and widgets is impressive.
The flexibility in integration with other tools as data sources of data enriching tools has been great.
It is open-source, so it saves a lot on costs and the community is friendly and powerful.
The product can be used to cater to multiple use cases. Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable.
The ability to import and export dashboards saves us a lot of time for popular systems and dashboards.
What needs improvement?
The lack of native ability to aggregate data from multiple sources could be improved. As it is not a data store, it is challenging to correlate data from multiple data sources. Adding an out-of-box capability to aggregate and correlate different types of data would make Grafana even better.
It is limited on the reporting type supported, which is important for managerial-level officers who want reports that are either general or specific. Improvements in that area would be great.
Machine learning capabilities are still limited. This is an improvement in that area is needed.
Performance improvement when querying and searching textual data would be beneficial.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for more than three years
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
When computing resources are properly optimized Grafana runs in a quite stable manner. As Grafana is an analytics and visualization platform, it is a bit hungry on CPU and Memory usage. When Grafana instances are properly planned and configured, computing resources bottlenecks can be avoided. Our instances haven't given us headaches from the time we set them up.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Grafana is mainly for visualization, so many instances can be set as needed. Grafana can also be configured for high availability for some scenarios like alerting, authentication, and databases.
How are customer service and support?
We haven't bought technical support and haven't dealt with their customer service agents.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used native dashboards and graphs of another system we use. We use Zabbix for monitoring but we added Grafana to add more visualization flexibility.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward, however, some resource optimization and tuning were needed. We have experienced professionals in tuning OS systems and application resources so it was not too complex for us.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented everything fully in-house. Since we never had a vendor team, we don't know yet the level of expertise they have. The Grafana community has been so helpful in this regard.
What was our ROI?
I can confidently say we have a 100% return on investment. Grafana has greatly enriched our data visualization and analytics. We see the prospect of it appealing even to more senior management. They may not be quite technical, but they appreciate having data nicely visualized so they know what is going on.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
You can choose from the fully open-source or enterprise editions. We chose the open-source and did everything in-house. Thorough planning and performance considerations are important, as the tool can be heavy on memory and computing resources.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We considered Kibana before we chose this solution.
What other advice do I have?
The solution is great and is one of the best in the market for visualization.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
System Engineer / Systems & Storage at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
A tool that users can understand and learn quickly to use
Pros and Cons
- "The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
- "I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation."
What is our primary use case?
I use Grafana since it is interconnected with Zabbix. I also use Grafana for the dashboard of machines from VMware and for some network devices connected to Zabbix.
What is most valuable?
The ability to use Grafana with Zabbix is a valuable feature for me. Zabbix provides me with alerts and information if something goes wrong, while Grafana offers a better dashboard that is more stable. If you know Grafana well, it can show you everything, like the uptime of different sources and other areas.
What needs improvement?
I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation. There is a problem in the area of some graphs where you connect elements. With Grafana, there is only one name that can be included for ten hours. In Grafana, only one big field with one text name is shown in the documentation. When it comes to production, it is only for a period of time that some fields on each side give the information they have. I researched on Google and other forums and saw that people face problems when they can't connect a field with the same value. The aforementioned area in the tool needs improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Grafana for nine months. I am a customer of the product.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have always had a stable version of the product. In general, I have not had any issues with the product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The technical personnel in my company use the tool, and it is possible to add or delete devices and other statuses in the solution. Around five people in my company use the product.
How are customer service and support?
I have always used the online forums or the internet to find information related to the product. I have not contacted the tool's technical support.
How was the initial setup?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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. I don't know if there are different paid versions of the product.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
My company chose Grafana over other products in the market considering its integration capabilities with Zabbix, good documentation, and the many topics about the tool that are available on the internet.
What other advice do I have?
I would suggest Grafana to those who use Zabbix because it helps users get a lot of information on networks and resolve a lot of problems.
I could do everything in Grafana with the help of graphs and documentation and get information on different types of devices.
I rate the overall tool an eight to nine out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Backend Dev at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Gives the visibility we need, and increases productivity and observability
Pros and Cons
- "It gives us the visibility we need. I like that when we add deployment markers or release markers, we know exactly when an issue arises. For instance, if there is an increased usage of CPU, we can link it directly to the deployment that might have caused the issue. It increases productivity and observability. We can now easily tell when a certain issue arises. It's way easier to debug because it can point you to certain things based on these markers, and we can debug easier."
- "It's difficult to see the trends on the graph when the range is too long."
What is our primary use case?
We have a few use cases. We have charts for infrastructure, CPU usage, etc. We have included a lot of metrics for WAFs. We also have some customer metrics and business metrics, such as any number of transactions for a specific action happening on the site.
What is most valuable?
It gives us the visibility we need. I like that when we add deployment markers or release markers, we know exactly when an issue arises. For instance, if there is an increased usage of CPU, we can link it directly to the deployment that might have caused the issue. It increases productivity and observability. We can now easily tell when a certain issue arises. It's way easier to debug because it can point you to certain things based on these markers, and we can debug easier.
What needs improvement?
It's difficult to see the trends on the graph when the range is too long.
For how long have I used the solution?
At the company, they'd been using Grafana since I joined. It has been about three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It has been working fine for us.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
With our workload, it's working fine. Going by that, I'd rate it a 10 out of 10, but I don't know about the other cases.
How are customer service and support?
I've not contacted them.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I don't know if it's the same, but we were using CloudWatch in AWS.
Honeycomb is also similar to this. With all the metrics and performances, you can build dashboards, but I'm new to it.
How was the initial setup?
Our team has two people who are in charge of that, but I'm not aware of its implementation.
What other advice do I have?
I don't have much experience with other tools, but for my specific case, it has been working great. I'd rate it a 10 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Software Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Easy to use, scalable, and stable
Pros and Cons
- "Kubernetes could help us to better visualize the trend of our data by recording and displaying our history over a chosen duration, such as the last 30 days."
- "It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
What is our primary use case?
In order to understand trends, troubleshoot any issues, and gain observability of our hundred-server retail market cluster, we started using Grafana. This allows us to detect causes and better understand what is happening in the cluster.
What is most valuable?
Kubernetes could help us to better visualize the trend of our data by recording and displaying our history over a chosen duration, such as the last 30 days. This allows us to better understand our data and the trends associated with it.
What needs improvement?
It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected. Additionally, other aspects such as networking may also come into play. Thus, the loading of graphs for long durations may require additional optimization to improve performance.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for a couple of years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the stability of the system a seven out of ten. There are some conditions that can affect this rating, however, we have already addressed a few issues that were causing problems in the backend.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I give the scalability of the solution an eight out of ten.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used Zabbix and switched to Grafana because of its ease of use.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is simple. Depending on our needs initially. To plot graphs, there are many plugins and open-source dashboards available for use.
What was our ROI?
All of us in the company have been utilizing Grafana and appreciating its results. Grafana is cost-effective and has provided us with a clear, comprehensive view of our applications, infrastructure, and more.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We use the open-source version of Grafana.
What other advice do I have?
I give the solution an eight out of ten.
The beginning is simple, so anyone interested can quickly deploy and begin using Grafana without any difficulty.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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