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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
5.4
Organizations using Grafana achieved up to 250% ROI, reduced costs, and improved monitoring and response times significantly.
Azure Monitor helps prevent impacts on their system.
Cloud Solution Architect at Cloudzant
I can say the estimated return on investment was one hundred fifty percent to two hundred fifty percent within the first year due to the reduced downtime and faster troubleshooting.
Devops Engineer at AIQOD
I identified over-provisioned servers and reduced my AWS monthly bill by 15%, which is a significant saving in terms of costs.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
 

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
7.2
Grafana's support receives mixed feedback, with praise for both its responsive technical team and effective community resources.
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
The technical support team is very helpful with complex PromQL troubleshooting.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
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
The documentation is comprehensive, and the active community makes it easy to find solutions to common issues.
Devops Engineer at AIQOD
 

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
5.5
Grafana scales effectively with integrations, but some users find complexity and scaling costs challenging for extensive environments.
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
It is highly scalable and built on a big data architecture capable of ingesting trillions of data points.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
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
7.9
Grafana is stable and reliable with minimal downtime, though resource optimization is key to maintaining performance and integration issues may occur.
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
Stable in the sense that we have experienced minimal downtime, and it performs reliably for day-to-day monitoring and dashboard visualization.
Devops Engineer at AIQOD
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
 

Room For Improvement

Azure Monitor struggles with user-friendliness, integration, complexity, multi-cloud support, proactive monitoring, and requires enhanced usability and cost transparency.
Grafana's usability suffers from complex UI, limited reporting, and integration challenges; enhancements in security, AI, and flexibility are needed.
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's open-source is cost-effective, but enterprise edition pricing varies by usage and infrastructure, with cloud options available.
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
There were no licensing costs.
Devops Engineer at AIQOD
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 user-friendly dashboards, customizable visualizations, seamless integrations, effective alerts, scalability, and community support for enhanced monitoring.
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
The fact that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table is a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere.
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
You can check those metrics in the incident management tool by filtering the alert source as Grafana, and it helps in reducing production incidents because you can acknowledge and visualize the metrics from Grafana on time.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 2.0%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 2.6%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Grafana2.6%
Azure Monitor2.0%
Other95.4%
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.
Vitthal Gole - PeerSpot reviewer
Devops Engineer at AIQOD
Proactive monitoring has transformed how our teams detect issues and resolve incidents faster
For improving Grafana, the alert configuration could be more intuitive for new users. Dashboard management becomes complex in large environments. So if we have multiple environments and we have to manage our dashboards for them, sometimes it becomes complicated to manage all the dashboards. The learning curve is steep for beginners. More built-in reporting and analytics features would be helpful. Documentation for advanced features could be more detailed. Role-based access management could be simpler to configure. Performance could be optimized for very large dashboards with high cardinality data sources. Grafana could improve its alert configuration workflow and make advanced dashboard management easier for new users. More built-in reporting features would also be beneficial. A simpler onboarding experience for first-time users and more built-in dashboard templates for common monitoring scenarios would be helpful. Grafana is a powerful monitoring platform, but it could improve dashboard organization in large environments, simplify alert management, provide more built-in reporting capabilities, enhance plugin compatibility during upgrades, and offer better AI-driven insights for fast root cause analysis. For example, if we are hitting a CPU metric of ninety to ninety-five percent or a system load of seventy to eighty percent, we have to act on that. But if Grafana suggests something on that metric, such as an AI suggestion, it would be more helpful. We could get an idea of how to solve that issue. For the Grafana dashboards, they could provide more built-in compliance and audit reporting, enhance AI recommendations with clearer explanations of why an issue was flagged, enhance accessibility and keyboard navigation, add more native integrations with emerging cloud and DevOps tools, and improve scalability for very large enterprise deployments. Grafana is a mature platform, but it could benefit from better dashboard version control, simpler environment migration, enhanced AI explanations, more built-in reporting, and improved performance for large-scale deployments with complex dashboards.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

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 Business14
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise27
 

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 needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
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...
What is your primary use case for Azure Monitor?
I am a developer who uses Azure Monitor for telemetry of the applications that I work on. Application Insights is one of those tools, and I have also used other non-Azure products before. Currently...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very reasonable and has excellent community support.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
Currently, I do not think that any improvement is required, but there are multiple use cases.
What is your primary use case for Grafana?
My main use case for Grafana is to create and design dashboards based on the metrics provided by different exporters via Prometheus. We have different exporters, and we are creating different dashb...
 

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: August 2026.
907,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.