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Dynatrace 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Dynatrace
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
345
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (4th), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (2nd)
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Dynatrace is 12.4%, down from 14.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 7.2%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Manish Ved - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution has a useful AI engine, but the reports could be a bit better
We are typically about a version or two behind. We are on the managed solution. Our model of deployment is on-premises. I would say there are a couple of thousand users of this solution in our company. We are also planning on increasing the usage as our apps migrate to the cloud. I would advise other people looking into solutions, to do their homework beforehand and not assume that by deploying all the tools everything will automatically work, so there's still a lot of configuration involved. I would rate this solution as a whole an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.
Vikash-Agarwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Displays data visually from multiple sources while integrating seamlessly with existing systems
Grafana provides a user-friendly interface for viewing infrastructure metrics through dashboards. It integrates with Prometheus to pull data and offers a straightforward setup process. Users can monitor metrics with greater ease, and the tool aids in quickly identifying issues by providing a visual representation of data. Grafana's integration capability is straightforward, which facilitates building dashboards as needed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I am primarily doing DC RUM, so on that side there are a lot of awesome abilities where people who can't implement an agent are able to still monitor a lot of their apps and decodes."
"I like the auto email alerting feature the most, as it is set up based on the application error or condition."
"Real-time information allows us to proactively tackle an issue before it affects our clients."
"It is cleaner and more compact with good UX/UI."
"We had point solutions where we could see different elements of the stack, and Dynatrace ties everything together. Before, we could never get that full-stack monitoring. It also helps us get us the context of the customer experience. What's the business impact of those problems?"
"Reduces the amount of knowledge that is needed by applications consuming this data."
"They have quick answers for scalability."
"What I like about it, is how it auto-discovers everything rapidly; within a matter of seconds you get to see the business transaction and how it's mapped within the product itself."
"We can write queries in different languages, which is beneficial for visualization."
"It is a stable, reliable product."
"This solution provides valuable insights into the health of our infrastructure in real time."
"Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable."
"The solution can scale well."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana is the ease to build dashboards from observability construction. Additionally, the page services and integration are good."
"The best thing about Grafana is the visualization. The colors and the ease of use make it very user-friendly."
"Grafana is stable and has great engineers."
 

Cons

"I haven't had a chance to go through all of it, but I would like to see the ability, from an administrative standpoint, for it to collect statistics. I want to be able to see the servers that the agents are installed on. I want it to be able to start doing collections for me by platform: How many Linux servers do I have? How many Windows servers do I have? Statistically give me the information of how things are performing, but I want that in a dashboard, where I can look at a dashboard and I can look at a section. So the ability for me to drill down will make it easier for me."
"I would like the ability to export a user session into csv format. (I am aware that I can export a user session via a webhook)."
"The challenge with AppMon is, what if you don't have an AppMon agent on a host, but it talks to the database. It talks to it, but I don't have either a host agent or an AppMon agent on it. That has been a challenge, but I believe the Dynatrace agent, the OneAgent, will solve that, potentially."
"We sometimes have to run plugins on docker containers."
"I do not like after 60 days or 90 days it gets aggregated to summary data. I would like to be able to analyze specific PurePaths after 30 days or 60 days with real numbers."
"Setting up the thresholds and alerting, it is complicated to understand their use cases."
"There were a number of marketing promises that were made, which we do not see it in the tool yet. ​"
"JIRA integration should be enriched and more granular."
"The solution must provide tutorials and guides."
"There is room for improvement when using multiple dashboards because they can become complicated to keep track of and use."
"If there was an issue on one node, we couldn't drill down and see all the issues on other nodes."
"​The security needs to be improved, such as the capacity to add permissions on dashboards.​"
"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"One area for improvement in Grafana is that depending on your version, you have to pay for the features, making the license expensive. It would be great if the licensing model could be more flexible. In the next release of Grafana, I want cluster creation to be available, which would help in Grafana deployment and scaling. Currently, the scaling process for the solution is a bit complicated."
"It would be helpful if they simplified the data source."
"The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its licensing is complicated or not transparent."
"It is quite costly. Dynatrace was the most expensive, compared to the other products we looked at. But it was also a lot better. If you want value for your money, Dynatrace is the way to go."
"The price could be improved."
"Product pricing can seem a little over complex, however this is minor and does not detract from the benefits of the solution."
"The only limitation with scaling to cloud-native environments is licensing. It all depends on how many DEM units you're willing to license. The more of DEM units that you purchase, the more user data you can collect."
"Everything is great, but the licensing could always be cheaper. With the every growing tool set of Ops teams, we find it harder to budget for tooling while ensuring we still have the proper insight into our applications."
"We are buying more licenses, because we are seeing more value."
"The pricing is a bit on the higher end."
"We are using the open-source license."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"I am using an open-source version"
"For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution."
"The solution is expensive."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
35%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...
What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?
While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
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?
I used the open-source version for my learning, which was free. In an enterprise setting, pricing is reasonable, as many customers use it.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
Grafana could consider building its own metrics system to eliminate the reliance on other tools like Prometheus, providing a one-stop solution.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
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 Dynatrace vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,791 professionals have used our research since 2012.