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Grafana vs Splunk Observability Cloud 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 Observability Cloud
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (10th), Cloud Monitoring Software (9th), Container Management (8th)
 

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 Observability Cloud is 1.0%, up from 0.5% 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.
Lakshmi Padaga - PeerSpot reviewer
Collaborates performance metrics with log data to pinpoint the exact cause of issues and offers error detection
Splunk APM is a robust tool with many capabilities. There are always areas for potential improvement to enhance its functionality and user experience. For Splunk APM, there could be simplified navigation, like streamlining the user interface to make navigation more intuitive for our users, especially those new to APM, which can enhance usability. We can provide more customization options for dashboards and visualizations to help users tailor the platform to their specific needs. There could be more integration capabilities with a wider range of third-party tools and platforms would also be beneficial. By focusing on these areas, Splunk APM can enhance its value proposition, improve user satisfaction, and better meet the evolving needs of organizations monitoring their application performance.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"Grafana is a very scalable product. It's a really good product."
"It's easy to make changes. We can put many dashboards in one place. There's no delay in showing data - what you see on Grafana matches the server metrics."
"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."
"Provides good dashboard visualization."
"It has good stability."
"The solution's most valuable aspect is its ability to get information about all of the security measurements in my environment."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring reduces our mean time to resolve. We are more proactive than reactive."
"The most valuable feature is dashboard creation."
"The vibrant dashboards are valuable."
"The features are pretty much ready out of the box."
"The initial setup was straightforward. We didn't find it to be too complex."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring provided our customers with visibility into their overall infrastructure."
"We haven't really experienced any glitches or bugs."
 

Cons

"The interface is not well-liked by my customers."
"Trigger limits are difficult to see in a graph."
"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."
"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"The product's configuration for saving files could be improved."
"I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients."
"All the features are complicated."
"A wide variety of logging makes log onboarding difficult."
"Splunk could be better integrated with configuration manager solutions so we can automatically resolve issues without human interference."
"Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring's data analytics can be improved by including suggestions for various types of continuous monitoring."
"There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available."
"The solution's stability is an area that has room for improvement. It needs to provide constant stability to its users."
"The deployment can be quite complex."
"We have both on-prem and cloud, and the challenge is getting all our log data aggregated or streams aggregated so that it is real-time. We do a pretty good job of that, but our organization is not using it as a security platform when it can do a great job of that."
"There is a lot of room for improvement with the automation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"I am using an open-source version"
"We are using the open-source license."
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"I give the price an eight out of ten."
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"We use the open-source version of Grafana."
"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."
"Splunk has been fairly expensive, but it has been predictable."
"Splunk's infrastructure monitoring costs can be high because our billing is based on data volume measured in terabytes, rather than the number of devices being monitored."
"The price of Slunk APM is less than some of its competitors."
"Licensing cost is the biggest argument I get from those divesting from Splunk. There are those within our organization who say we are going to go to other tools since Splunk is too expensive."
"I would rate the price of Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring as an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."
"This is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The solution's pricing is competitive. I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten. The price of the solution could be cheaper."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
8%
 

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 ...
What do you like most about SignalFx?
The most valuable feature is dashboard creation.
What needs improvement with SignalFx?
There is room for improvement in the alerting system, which is complicated and has less documentation available. We sometimes encountered issues in setting up alerts. The custom detector could be m...
What is your primary use case for SignalFx?
The main purpose of using Splunk APM is to optimize our application. We use Splunk APM primarily to understand how the application works, how it uses resources, and its response time in connection ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Overview

 

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.
Sunrun, Yelp, Onshape, Tapjoy, Symphony Commerce, Chairish, Clever, Grovo, Bazaar Voice, Zenefits, Avalara
Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana vs. Splunk Observability Cloud and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
841,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.