Grafana vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Splunk Observability Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Splunk Observability Cloud aims to enable operational agility and better customer experience through real-time AI-driven streaming analytics allowing accurate alerts in seconds. It is designed to shorten MTTD and MTTR by providing real-time visibility into cloud infrastructure and services.
$15
per month (billed annually) per host
Pricing
GrafanaSplunk Observability Cloud
Editions & Modules
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
Infrastructure
$15
per month (billed annually) per host
App & Infra
$60
per month (billed annually) per host
End-to-End
$75
per month (billed annually) per host
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GrafanaSplunk Observability Cloud
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaSplunk Observability Cloud
Considered Both Products
Grafana
Chose Grafana
Easy to use
Easy to configure
Cost efficient
Chose Grafana
Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't …
Chose Grafana
Grafana gives more flexibility to explore its features. A new user can explore experiment and work with free Grafana account and find if it is suitable for them.Other platforms don't have the features in their freemium version that Grafana has. It lets us try features of …
Chose Grafana
Grafana has a direct plugin to Icinga monitoring solution and allowed for easy configuration for us. At the time of implementation, other services did not have such an integration. As we already had a very customized and heavily introduced monitoring solution in place, we …
Chose Grafana
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.
Splunk Observability Cloud
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
To be honest, Datadog is very similar to Splunk and LogScale to a lesser degree, but it is just as good if you don't need too complex observability. Grafana is still growing and might reach the same level soon.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Tenable Cloud Security and SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
It's able to quickly detect and resolve issues across the entire spectrum of deployments including on-premises, public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud and multicloud
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
The above applications have their own use cases. Thousand Eyes or Sitescope is used for URL monitoring and Splunk is used for application monitoring. Appdynamics is also used for application monitoring and can monitor the server very well but it lacks when searching in logs …
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
It has edge because of our existing logging solutions is Splunk
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk is superior in many ways to these solutions when I'm comes to ingesting, storing, manipulating, and using data, but dynatraces automatic agents do make it much easier to use out of the box. Nagios seems much cheaper but does not provide as much functionality as Splunk. …
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Because it's very easy to use & detailed and I love the graphics you feel everything under control any issue you can track it immediately
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
New Relic has more deep into the application using agents.
We try to use them in parallel to find errors in the infrastructure.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
I had not considered other products because Splunk Log Observer was in use in my company before I started working there.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
We believe that it's less vulnerable to security aspects as compared to others.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk requires less work for data in gestion and parsing. Splunk has more efficient data display features.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk Log Observer provides easy setup and ease of admin features and direction of product was better compared to Lightstep
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk is easy to customize and ingest our data. It is far more understandable and secure than other applications.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
SQL is a great tool for smaller quick checks. When trying to monitor several different environments, applications, APIs, several thousand devices, connections, and technology, it just doesn't stand up to what you need. Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring has really stood out …
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
We are having other monitoring tools like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Datadog and already using their end-user monitoring capability. Most of our customers are looking for agent-free monitoring where they don't want to instrument any agent on their client-side (as it might …
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring provides far superior options for anybody using a complex hybrid multi-cloud environment and allows both your SOC and NOC to work together on the same data while driving their own insights.

We found other products are still in the old world view …
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
The tool was deployed over most of the major applications on the client-side.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
The use of a single integration and definition of custom metrics, and tags is a great advantage. The ability to use SignalFlow to observe metrics in addition to the vast number of out-of-the-box dashboards is also excellent.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring is the only product of its kind that I've used and I've been very happy with it.
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
government is hesitant of choosing a solarwinds product for security purposes
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Much more powerful
Chose Splunk Observability Cloud
Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) has a much better artificial intelligence engine. It also has a much better and more intuitive user interface. Splunk RUM also allows end-to-end visibility into the front and the backend. Technical support and customer service are also much …
Features
GrafanaSplunk Observability Cloud
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
Ratings
5% below category average
Splunk Observability Cloud
-
Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards10.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
6.8
Ratings
16% below category average
Splunk Observability Cloud
-
Ratings
Drill-down analysis6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages5.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.4
Ratings
0% below category average
Splunk Observability Cloud
-
Ratings
Publish to Web7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Versioning9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
7.7
Ratings
6% below category average
Splunk Observability Cloud
-
Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaSplunk Observability Cloud
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Logz.io
Logz.io
Score 7.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 7.6 out of 10
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaSplunk Observability Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
6.4
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaSplunk Observability Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
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
Read full review
The query language is relatively easy and flexible when looking into an application's problems. These queries can then be used for alerts, reports, and dashboards. I believe Splunk is a platform that can help a system grow into its proactive application management, using incidents to add insights as needed without trying to work out every scenario in advance.
Read full review
Pros
  • 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
Read full review
  • The first one is its Kubernetes container monitoring.
  • I really like this features because as we know how much K8s is vast and to manually monitor each part of the Kubernetes it takes so much time but Splunk Observability Cloud makes it easier. And even once we integrate K8s with Splunk Observability Cloud it gives us some prebuilt dashboards which gives holistic view of our Cluster and its nodes, pods, etc.
  • The dashbaord feature of Splunk Observability Cloud, it gives us full flexibility to customize our dashboard with a wide range of predefined chart types.
  • Now it also supports OTEL, which is a plus point for observability. As now everyone is moving towards Otel and in current market there are only few tools who supports OTEL based integrations, Splunk Observability Cloud is one out of them.
Read full review
Cons
  • Documentation needs to be more clarified since it can be confusing for beginners
  • Notification alert message templates need to be simplified
Read full review
  • An indicator for errors on the navigations pane so that we don't have to go through each tab.
  • As we go more and more cloud maybe you guys can implement a pay-as-you-use strategy so that small companies using it not frequently can also afford it.
  • That's it can't think of any and it wont let me skip to next question. Thanks
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
Good: Stable system with low error rate Easy to use for simple use cases Bad: UI is not very clear for complex usage Mobile view (when logged in from phone) is bad No library for .net
Read full review
Usability
Great usage in terms of monitoring of any application from backend to frontend and even any AWS resource via cloud watch and other connectors. Easy to use and configure personalised dash boarding and alerting features. Cost efficient and easy to setup and run, no mazor scaling challenges in terms of managing and maintaining the stack, easy to configure via Prometheus, influx and other connectors
Read full review
When there is an issue, it’s a win if one can easily identify the root cause. To do the same, it should allow the user to dig deep with multiple data points and compare the data and identify the anomaly. In this use case, it’s good to drive from Splunk 011y.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
Splunk support is very quick and efficient. Pre-sale specialists are very skilled and available.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Follow a training before starting.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't offer nearly as much flexibility. The other thing I like about Grafana is their storage usage is much lower compared to similar tools and competitors
Read full review
We initially chose Splunk Observability Cloud because it promised full-stack visibility and tighter integration. The other tools didn't offer this as part of the core package. Their analytics and real-time dashboards looked strong during the demo but it turned out to a lot heavier and more complex than expected. If I had to decide again, I’d probably go with something more streamlined and easier to manage.
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Return on Investment
  • It has kicked out some of our paid monitoring and visualization tools.
  • Now Monitoring, Visualization and Alerting is being done in a single platform.
  • It made monitoring and visualization very easy for us.
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  • Significantly reduced the MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery), which in turn has improved the end-user experience tremendously.
  • Meets compliance requirements of security policies, audit, regulation, and forensics.
  • Helps us to track/manage the resource usage on our cloud instances which has a direct implication on the recurring cost.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Splunk Observability Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Real-time monitoring for public, private and hybrid cloud