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Grafana vs Splunk AppDynamics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 6, 2025

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

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
Splunk AppDynamics
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
244
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th), IT Operations Analytics (2nd), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Grafana is 6.4%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 4.9%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Muhammad Zeeshan Siddiqui - PeerSpot reviewer
Dynamic mapping enhances workflows that are user-friendly
One aspect that requires improvement is the agent. Without an agent, gathering sufficient information on applications is challenging. Additionally, the agent sometimes creates performance issues in production environments. If AppDynamics could develop a means to monitor without an agent, it could significantly improve application performance and reduce potential problems. Moving to an agentless solution, like what some competitors are doing, would be beneficial.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Kubernetes could help us to better visualize the trend of our data by recording and displaying our history over a chosen duration, such as the last 30 days."
"Grafana is stable and has great engineers."
"Grafana's built-in integration with third-party tools, databases, and MQs is an amazing feature."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana is the ease to build dashboards from observability construction. Additionally, the page services and integration are good."
"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."
"The best thing about Grafana is the visualization. The colors and the ease of use make it very user-friendly."
"It is a stable, reliable product."
"The analytics are great."
"You have a live view of what happens when something goes wrong on the production or support side. You don't have to scramble and do guesswork. We can identify the query that creates the bottleneck or slows the performance of the database system. It can give you points on how to debug and fix the system."
"What I found valuable in AppDynamics Database Monitoring is good technical support. I also like that it's scalable and stable."
"AppDynamics Database Monitoring provides a single view of the problem and helps identify the guilty database query, which is unique compared to other solutions."
"Once you get past installation, AppDynamics is highly stable and we get good results."
"The dashboards are very well-defined."
"The real-time feature provides me with insights into what's happening."
"This solution is easy to use and very powerful, it is a complete tool for us."
 

Cons

"It would be helpful if they simplified the data source."
"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
"Multiple dashboards combined into one dashboard has slowed things down for us."
"Grafana could improve by having its own query language. Currently, it uses languages like Prometheus or InfluxDB, which not everyone knows. Their query language should be easier."
"The features are complicated and not intuitive."
"It would be helpful if Grafana provided more information and training on how to use Prometheus."
"There are some areas of network drives that are not showing as expected based on server usage."
"The interface is not well-liked by my customers. Grafana cannot be easily embedded into certain applications and offers limited customization options for graphs."
"They are using Flash for their website, which is very slow. We had hoped the website would be much faster to use, and that is definitely what we want to see."
"This product has an issue with initial lag upon opening that we would like to see improved."
"I would like them to change their business model for scalability to accommodate growing companies. The business model should be more flexible."
"The challenge in the installation is that you have to configure a lot of things manually. The way you install and configure it is not straightforward."
"There are too many installers available for this solution."
"It could do with more than one data centre/multiple AWS accounts in a pane of glass. Also, improved scalability to large environments would be helpful."
"At this time, we don't have much visibility on the virtual environment, monitoring, and all other things. We have visibility only for database monitoring, and we have noticed performance impact when deploying database agents on the database server. We got to know this from AppDynamics support also that we should not deploy database agents from the database server. When agents are deployed on the same server and the database is monitored from there, we are not getting database server metrics. Therefore, we don't have those insights, and sometimes, we struggle because of that. They can improve this functionality so that we do not have a performance impact, and we can deploy anywhere. This would help us a lot. In terms of end-user monitoring, currently, it is not working for us because there are some complexities. It is a little complicated, and it takes a little bit of time to understand where you need to make changes. It would be very helpful if they can provide some template designs for end-user monitoring. When our servers are running on VMs, we don't get many insights from the VM side. I don't know whether it is possible to have visibility beyond the database, server, and application and whether there are some features where we can deploy AppDynamics on VMs as well. Such functionality would give us more control over storage, VM, OS, and database. It will also provide complete visibility of our hardware and software."
"AppD is really cool and a unified solution for both APM and APM centric Analytics side. We can show almost all business data within the APM context from the end-user perspetive. But this process is a little bit manual. If they catch and map business journeys based on customer interaction on the browser automatically, it should be really fine."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"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."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"The solution is expensive."
"The pricing is very competitive."
"We are looking forward to purchasing the solution on the AWS Marketplace."
"In terms of pricing, I feel that when you compare the benefits that we get to the price that we paid, it is reasonable."
"I rate AppDynamics Mobile Real-User Monitoring's pricing as seven out of ten. Mobile monitoring is paid based on the number of instances utilizing the mobile monitoring service, which increases as the scale grows. Consequently, your mobile user count can proportionally surpass all other applications."
"Because it is priced per JVM, the price can increase pretty fast, into the millions. We have had challenges because we had to justify the price to our clients, as well, when we are putting in certain tools."
"AppDynamics Server Monitoring is an expensive solution."
"This price of this product is expensive."
"The tool is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
6%
Educational Organization
49%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
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...
APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...
 

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Sample Customers

Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers
Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana vs. Splunk AppDynamics and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
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