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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
7.4
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 March 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Dynatrace is 10.9%, down from 13.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 6.4%, 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

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a comprehensive view by integrating with other monitoring systems
There may be an issue since there are many tools like Splunk involved in network monitoring. From an IP perspective, Dynatrace is performing well. If they want to develop in network monitoring, they can, as it's part of their product line. It's not rocketry, so they can accomplish it. If I, as an SI, look at it from an enterprise perspective, considering the cost from the client, I prefer not to go with multiple systems, as they don't provide a complete 360-degree view. They need to improve on claims about being an enterprise system. The definition of enterprise is loosely used, however, from a holistic security perspective, including infrastructure, network, ports, software, applications, transactions, and databases, there are areas lacking, especially in network monitoring tools.
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

"You can see every step a transaction goes through, which servers it hits, and what technology it uses."
"The most valuable feature is, I can quickly go to the PurePath and find the problem in the application. I can say that it provides me a way by which I can quickly find the root cause of the problem."
"Scalability is great. My biggest concern when we first put it in was the resources that it would take up, network traffic that it might create. But it seems perfectly scalable to any environment. Even on some of our heaviest use servers, it doesn't seem to affect anything."
"It helps our organization identify potential problems by doing thorough analysis of systems which integrate with one another."
"The solution's most valuable features are AI and root cause analysis."
"Most importantly the back-end components. Most of the back-end components that the application connects to; nobody knows how our application interacts with, for example, the DataPower Gateway. But AppMon really provides that information for us. So finding the gaps is the key here."
"It has improved our critical incident response, exposing critical issues impacting the environment and our ability to respond to those events prior to client impact as well as resolving those events more quickly. We have use cases where we have studied a 70 percent improvement for response times in an occurring event as well as future reoccurrences being improved."
"Google says is that you have a number of things on which you should measure your performance. One is if there's an error or not. Dynatrace tells you whether is an error or not. Second is saturation, whether something is getting saturated. You should be aware of what is getting saturated. Dynatrace even tells you that. The third is if there is a latency. Network latency is also told to me by Dynatrace."
"It is easy to change and move virtual servers."
"It is a stable, reliable product."
"Collaboration: Shares data and dashboards across teams."
"It has good stability."
"Grafana is able to connect with multiple data sources, unlike Elasticsearch."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"Great capacity planning and the solution has a great GUI."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
 

Cons

"If you have many distributed servers, you will need to install or migrate every agent. This can be a problem if you have too many, and it takes time."
"The solution could improve on integration, cloud services, and making the configuration less difficult."
"Dynatrace must reduce the required resources for on-premise, because they are too high."
"It would be good to extend the visibility to cover more infrastructure monitoring capabilities and more network performance capabilities."
"It often produces "false alarms" and cannot identify failure patterns over days/weeks that do not indicate concern."
"To improve in Dynatrace the log analytics, this is the first thing that has to be enabled."
"I am unable to use Synthetic to automate user login."
"With Dynatrace in our environment, the managed server required root access to run. As a government agency with tight security, this has been an audit concern for us."
"Multiple dashboards combined into one dashboard has slowed things down for us."
"Lacks event management which affects our DevOps people."
"Grafana doesn't provide anything for reporting."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs."
"I have a problem with Grafana in the area of documentation."
"Writing queries can be a bit difficult because the syntax must be maintained."
"If there was an issue on one node, we couldn't drill down and see all the issues on other nodes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Setup cost is very low considering that it is an almost totally, automatic process."
"​Make sure your leadership buy-in is in place. Ensure leadership understands that an APM solution is a fairly expensive, so they know what they are getting into."
"We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good."
"Decodes on less used/popular protocols are available, but they should be included. Additional investment should not be required."
"They could improve their price ranges, as there is no option for startups or testing."
"The licensing model is confusing in solutioning clients for the number of hosts needed to deploy."
"Dynatrace is very good and it's provided a lot of information, it plays a positive role in making your application up to date in the market. If you want to monitor some applications only, it would be cheaper if you did cloud monitoring, but the price benefit depends on the use case."
"I think that the price is reasonable."
"We are using the open-source license."
"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."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"The solution is expensive."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
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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?
The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs. I think predictive capabilities in ...
 

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: March 2025.
841,004 professionals have used our research since 2012.