Akamai mPulse vs Grafana comparison

Akamai mPulse is a real user monitoring (RUM) solution that gives performance engineers, administrators, and developers the ability to effortlessly visualize website functionality issues and identify ways to improve processes that conventional testing protocols do not find. mPulse gives users usable scenarios to better understand how processes such as user interactions, visual progress, and third-party resources may be disrupting the overall user experience and application delivery.

mPulse enables users to take a deep dive into the specific performance issues and complete comprehensive error analyses, to thoroughly understand the effect on critical user interactions such as conversions, page views, and more.

mPulse gathers and delivers data on an organization's website’s performance and metrics on user web browsing experiences. The mPulse feature “Boomerang” is a JavaScript Library that monitors the website page load time. Boomerang has a unique plugin architecture and works with all websites. The Boomerang feature is embedded on each page of an organization's website.

mPulse works seamlessly with Akamai solution Ion, so the RUM data can be instantly gathered once the Luna Control Center has been activated. Ion instantly attaches Boomerang to the organization’s web properties; there is no need to change the website code.

Akamai mPulse Benefits

• Third-party monitoring: mPulse enables users to effortlessly monitor and visualize the effect that third-party vendors, resources, and scripts may have on the organization’s web properties.
  
  
• Real-time intuitions: RUM data is continually being gathered, so users are able to instantly experience changes in user performance during every critical event. Users are able to respond immediately and make corrections or amendments as needed. Additionally, mPulse integrates effectively with other third-party notification solutions, such as Slack, PagerDuty, and webhook API support.
  
  
• Framework integrations: mPulse integrates with many of today’s popular single-page application (SPA) frameworks, such as React.js, Backbone.js, Angular.js, Ember.js, and even some custom frameworks. mPulse has the ability to also be seamlessly integrated in Non-SPA websites.
  
  
• Intuitive feedback: mPulse gathers data and creates workable solutions so users have a better understanding of how objects, images, or even entire pages are affecting user behavior. Users can gather numerous metrics (custom or advanced) to achieve a better, more complete understanding of ways to improve the user experience with the application or website.
  
  
• Custom metrics and timers: With mPulse, users can effortlessly create custom timers to discover important performance sessions unique to the application. The mPulse dashboard allows users to set up trackers for numerous metrics, such as:
  
  
  • First image load time
  • Sidebar load time
  • Page load times
  • Third-party resource content load time
    
    
• mPulse Beacon API: This valuable benefit allows users to send custom metrics from mobile and web applications to mPulse. This gives mPulse greater flexibility and usability to frameworks and platforms that can make HTTP calls. Representational State Transfer (REST) interface is included and is able to be used by any web application using any language running on the platform. There is also a Beacon API library for JavaScript. This option is available from the dashboard by creating a new application and an API key.

Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics platform that stands out in the field of monitoring solutions. Grafana is widely recognized for its powerful, easy-to-set-up dashboards and visualizations. Grafana supports integration with a wide array of data sources and tools, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, MySQL, Splunk, and Elasticsearch, enhancing its versatility. Grafana has open-source and cloud options; the open-source version is a good choice for organizations with the resources to manage their infrastructure and want more control over their deployment. The cloud service is a good choice if you want a fully managed solution that is easy to start with and scale.

A key strength of Grafana lies in its ability to explore, visualize, query, and alert on the collected data through operational dashboards. These dashboards are highly customizable and visually appealing, making them a valuable asset for data analysis, performance tracking, trend spotting, and detecting irregularities.

Grafana provides both an open-source solution with an active community and Grafana Cloud, a fully managed and composable observability offering that packages together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. The open-source version is licensed under the Affero General Public License version 3.0 (AGPLv3), being free and unlimited. Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise are available for more advanced needs, catering to a wider range of organizational requirements. Grafana offers options for self-managed backend systems or fully managed services via Grafana Cloud. Grafana Cloud extends observability with a wide range of solutions for infrastructure monitoring, IRM, load testing, Kubernetes monitoring, continuous profiling, frontend observability, and more.

The Grafana users we interviewed generally appreciate Grafana's ability to connect with various data sources, its straightforward usability, and its integration capabilities, especially in developer-oriented environments. The platform is noted for its practical alert configurations, ticketing backend integration, and as a powerful tool for developing dashboards. However, some users find a learning curve in the initial setup and mention the need for time investment to customize and leverage Grafana effectively. There are also calls for clearer documentation and simplification of notification alert templates.

In summary, Grafana is a comprehensive solution for data visualization and monitoring, widely used across industries for its versatility, ease of use, and extensive integration options. It suits organizations seeking a customizable and scalable platform for visualizing time-series data from diverse sources. However, users should be prepared for some complexity in setup and customization and may need to invest time in learning and tailoring the system to their specific needs.