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Azure Monitor vs Grafana comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.4
Azure Monitor's ROI is mixed: some value its cost-effectiveness and insights, while others question its expense.
Sentiment score
4.5
Users and managers find Grafana valuable for cost-effective data visualization, enhancing application and infrastructure insights.
Azure Monitor helps prevent impacts on their system.
Cloud Solution Architect at Cloudzant
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.1
Azure Monitor's customer service is praised for responsiveness, especially with premium support, but can improve on general knowledge and speed.
Sentiment score
6.3
Grafana users appreciate community support and prompt formal assistance, with enterprise users benefiting from knowledgeable representatives and helpful guides.
However, the second-line support is good.
Snr. Infrastructure Architect (Data Centre) at LogicEra
Users end up getting no resolution from their team because they're outsourced vendors, and they don't have deeper expertise over any of the products they are referring to.
Software Engineer (DevOps/ SRE) at Sensys LLC
I would rate the support for Azure Monitor as a seven.
Cloud Solution Architect at Cloudzant
My advice for people who are new to Grafana or considering it is to reach out to the community mainly, as that's the primary benefit of Grafana.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
I do not use Grafana's support for technical issues because I have found solutions on Stack Overflow and ChatGPT helps me as well.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
I very rarely get in touch with technical support as we don't have that option.
Senior Application Performance Monitoring and Alerting Specialist at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Azure Monitor provides scalable solutions for businesses, supports auto-scaling, integrates with tools, but requires careful cost management.
Sentiment score
5.1
Grafana is scalable and effective for monitoring, though costs and complexity rise with larger deployments or open-source versions.
With APM, you can go heavy or you can go light. It just depends on what you want, what your use case is, and how reactive you want to be to system load or resilient to failure.
Consultant at a outsourcing company with 201-500 employees
Azure Monitor is very scalable; there are no issues with scalability for different kinds of businesses.
Cloud Solution Architect at Cloudzant
In terms of our company, the infrastructure is using two availability zones in AWS.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
In assessing Grafana's scalability, we started noticing logs missing or metrics not syncing in time.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Azure Monitor is highly stable and reliable, though less agile, with high user ratings and potential cost concerns.
Sentiment score
7.6
Grafana is highly stable, with most users experiencing smooth operation and minimal issues, rating its reliability very high.
Azure Monitor is working fine, yet I face a costing issue as if there are a lot of logs collected in the workspace or in the center, it becomes very costly.
Snr. Infrastructure Architect (Data Centre) at LogicEra
When something in their dashboard does not work, because it is open source, I am able to find all the relative combinations that people are having, making it much easier for me to fix.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
Once you get to a higher load, you need to re-evaluate your architecture and put that into account.
Sr. DevOps at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
The product has been stable.
Senior Application Performance Monitoring and Alerting Specialist at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Azure Monitor struggles with user-friendliness, integration, complexity, multi-cloud support, proactive monitoring, and requires enhanced usability and cost transparency.
Grafana needs improvements in security, usability, data correlation, integration, and flexibility, with enhanced reporting, machine learning, and user interface.
If Azure Monitor can independently add one gigabyte, two gigabytes, or five gigabytes at least to log storage, I can fix the logs without syncing with Log Analytics Workspace and Sentinel.
Snr. Infrastructure Architect (Data Centre) at LogicEra
The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that the actual cost of the Kubernetes cluster was less than the cost they were incurring for Azure Monitor.
Software Engineer (DevOps/ SRE) at Sensys LLC
The challenges with Azure Monitor are that it's initially complex to set up because you need multiple components.
Cloud Solution Architect at Cloudzant
It would be better if they made the technology easy to use without needing to read extensive documentation.
AWS Cloud Re-Start Program Specialist at Orange RDC (Congo)
Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs.
BI and Analytics Engineer at Sandvine Inc
I would want to see improvements, especially in the tracing part, where following different requests between different services could be more powerful.
Director of Engineering at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Azure Monitor offers cost-effective variable pricing, but careful management is essential to avoid high expenses for enterprise users.
Grafana provides open-source for free and enterprise versions vary in cost based on metrics, plugins, and features.
When I export logs into the application, workspace, log analytic workspace, and into Sentinel to read reports, I need to add storage, which increases the cost.
Snr. Infrastructure Architect (Data Centre) at LogicEra
In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
Aplication Architect at Amazon
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it.
DevOps Team Lead at Kadabra
 

Valuable Features

Azure Monitor provides comprehensive real-time monitoring, alerting, and analytics, enhancing security and scalability for seamless infrastructure management.
Grafana offers intuitive dashboards, strong integration, powerful visualizations, live monitoring, and extensive plugins, making it ideal for development teams.
The alerting features definitely help in reducing operational downtime for my customers by allowing us to get notifications in advance and take active actions.
Cloud Solution Architect at Cloudzant
I also appreciate the ability to measure feature activity, see what types of devices they are on, follow specific use cases, and measure the amount of traffic going to a particular application.
Consultant at a outsourcing company with 201-500 employees
Resource monitoring is essential.
Snr. Infrastructure Architect (Data Centre) at LogicEra
Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data.
Aplication Architect at Amazon
Its alerting feature is effective because it allows me to set thresholds to send an email if a certain threshold is met.
BI and Analytics Engineer at Sandvine Inc
It's definitely useful for monitoring, alerting, logs, and analysis.
Director of Engineering at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (3rd)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 3.7%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 4.2%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Grafana4.2%
Azure Monitor3.7%
Other92.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Andy Rabern - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a outsourcing company with 201-500 employees
Telemetry insights have improved how I track user behavior and application performance daily
I feel Azure Monitor does a fair job. I do feel it is not a streaming service in my opinion. There are advantages to having stream messaging and logging on that level. But for what it is, I feel it does well. My perspective is more based on an Application Insights agent running on a service or an app service and sending the telemetry via the agent, and also doing the filtering of telemetry at the agent level so you are not having a ton of telemetry. I believe Azure Monitor does pretty much the same thing. I have also used tools such as New Relic, and New Relic is a much more robust tool, but that is a different product and you are going to pay for that. It is a different offering altogether. The subscription that we had at the time allowed for a couple gigabytes of telemetry during the month, and I believe that telemetry only lives for about two months. You have to experiment with it to see how much you want to pay. I was not really involved in the pricing. It was more along the lines of we were running up against our limits in terms of the amount of free telemetry or telemetry that we get with our subscription, and so we either needed to scale back or turn specific telemetry types off or do some more sampling. It is nice that those capabilities are there so that you can reduce the amount of telemetry. I cannot really speak to pricing but I do believe that it is somewhat reasonable for Azure Monitor. New Relic is pretty expensive, I believe.
Julian-Lewis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Application Performance Monitoring and Alerting Specialist at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Has provided real-time views and integrated insights across diverse data sources
The most valuable feature is Grafana's ability to plug in data or events and monitoring data from any kind of source. The graphing capability is what I use the most. I have made use of Grafana's customizable dashboards and templating features. These features have enhanced my data visualization and analytical processes by enabling me to give real-time views to our end-users of what they're doing or what their service is doing. The historical and trend data allow people to pull up data from Grafana and from whatever source to display it and examine how an environment is being used. I have employed real-time metric visualization capabilities for monitoring and real-time views. These dashboards can also be used as historical views, pulling out more data. The effectiveness of Grafana in delivering real-time notifications through its alerting system is quite good. The widgets are able to highlight errors if they happen in real-time on the dashboard. The alerting functionality is improving. I generally tend to use the monitoring tool for alerting rather than Grafana, but I have had to use Grafana occasionally without any issues.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
What do you like most about Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.
What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
The challenges with Azure Monitor are that it's initially complex to set up because you need multiple components. Azure Monitor is one thing, but within Azure Monitor, you need to bring Log Analyti...
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?
The costs associated with using Grafana are somewhere in the ten thousands because we are able to control the logs in a more efficient way to reduce it. That is pretty much great for us.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
Grafana could be improved through enhancement of graphs and visualizations and providing more integrations. Grafana is going to start working with OpenTelemetry, which would be helpful to have the ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group
Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Monitor vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,310 professionals have used our research since 2012.