BrightGauge vs. Grafana

BrightGauge lets us know when we have critical issues that need solving. A massive influx of tickets all at the same time triggers an investigation. Usually, it is tied to a server going down, which we can address. It would not be helpful for a small MSP or IT department with just a few daily tickets. The stats are better used to track a large amount of clients.

Incentivized

Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation

Incentivized

• SQL queries can be presented in many different ways to illustrate the data. They can be used in lists, graphs, meter, etc.
• The datasets frequency of updates can be customized to from 5 minutes to annually. It's very granular in this respect.
• It allows dashboards to be shared outside your organization with clients, partners, and vendors to maximize collaboration and reporting.

Incentivized

• Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
• Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
• Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
• Microservices monitoring
• Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere

Incentivized

• Annual or more than annualized data is desperately needed for MSPs to show trends, current limitation is previous 240 days for ConnectWise tickets
• Alerts when datasets do not sync properly, I have to rely on my team to notice vs get an automated alert from BrightGauge
• Small thing, but it would be nice to have more options on the report scheduler to enable a start date. If you wish to do it quarterly, you have to start the schedule exactly 3 months from the next run.

Incentivized

• There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
• We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
• In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.

Usability is BrightGauge's strength. Granting the ability of virtually any user to be able to create a dashboard is incredibly valuable. If an organization very simple and straight forward reporting needs then BrightGauge is a perfect fit for them. Connecting to the dataset we used was very quick and easy and I imagine it would be the same for any major data source you would like to pull from.

Incentivized

It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources

Incentivized

Anytime I have reached out to the BrightGauge support team they have been quick, responsive, and solved my issue. They go out of their way to be helpful!

Incentivized

I'm not aware of any other competitors to Bright Gauge that we selected. They seem to be very close to managed IT service providers and have been great at tailoring their support to the PSAs like ConnectWise, AutoTask, etc. I can see Bright Gauge getting more and more popular as time goes by

Incentivized

Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.

Incentivized

• We were purchased by a large PE firm because we could easily show CSAT ratings.
• The easily trackable stats are suitable for the C-Suite to see which division is the most profitable.
• We won 60,000 MRR by displaying to potential customers how we track important issues with the gauges.

Incentivized

• Grafana has replaced many higher priced tools
• The integrations are seemless with multiple backends
• Combining graphs and dashboards from multiple data sources is a game changer

Incentivized