21 Best Grafana Alternatives For Observability & Data Visualization

Are you looking to enhance your application performance monitoring capabilities and find alternatives to Grafana? Choosing the right monitoring tool can be crucial for your system's health. Monitoring can help you understand how your applications perform and reduce the risk of outages. The right tool can also provide details on how your applications are responding to users and the systems they’re running on. This article will compare different Grafana alternatives, helping you understand which is best for your needs.

Do you want a totally free tool for metrics, logs, and traces? Alerty is the solution for you. It is a free platform that enables you to monitor the performance of your applications in real time and troubleshoot issues faster. See the value of monitoring with a free APM with Alerty.

Table of Contents

• What Is Grafana?
• Why People Look For Grafana Alternatives?
• 21 Best Grafana Alternatives For Observability & Data Visualization
• Criteria To Consider When Choosing A Grafana Alternative
• Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users with Alerty's Free APM Solution

What Is Grafana?

Grafana is an open-source interactive data visualization platform that allows users to see their data through unified charts and graphs displayed in one dashboard or multiple dashboards. Grafana Labs developed it and offers the following:

• Functionality to query
• Set alerts on information
• Metrics stored in various locations such as traditional server environments, Kubernetes clusters, or cloud services

With Grafana, users canL

• Analyze data
• Identify trends and inconsistencies
• Enhance the efficiency of their processes

The platform was designed based on open principles, believing that data should be accessible throughout an organization rather than limited to a select few. This approach encourages a culture where all team members easily find and utilize data, fostering openness, innovation, and collaboration.

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Why People Look For Grafana Alternatives?

Grafana may offer extensive monitoring capabilities, but its fair share of challenges make users explore alternative solutions. From complex setup processes to the deep learning curve, Grafana has faced criticism on various fronts. Users find the user interface lacking support, particularly for intricate systems, making it hard to configure integrations and connections. Eventually, the complexity of integrating data sources can overwhelm non-technical users.

Addressing Monitoring Challenges

If you’re grappling with the above issues, it’s time to seek alternatives that offer a more tailored solution to your specific needs. Alerty is a cloud monitoring service catering to developers and early-stage startups. The platform provides:

• Database monitoring
• Incident management
• Application performance monitoring, focusing on technologies like NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js. 

Alerty supports databases such as:

• Supabase
• PostgreSQL
• RDS

Users can benefit from its efficient incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) capabilities to optimize the end-user experience.

Cost-Effective and User-Friendly Monitoring for Developers

For those looking for a cost-effective yet efficient monitoring solution, integrating Alerty could be a game-changer. The service uses AI to simplify the setup process, offering a competitive edge in the market. Unlike its competitors, Alerty emphasizes ease of use, enabling quick and seamless integration with tools like Sentry. 

If you belong to the developer community or a small team requiring a reliable monitoring tool, Alerty’s free APM (Application Performance Monitoring) solution is worth exploring to address potential issues before they impact your users proactively.

21 Best Grafana Alternatives For Observability & Data Visualization

1. Alerty

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups, offering:

• Application performance monitoring
• Database monitoring
• Incident management

It supports technologies like NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js, helping developers identify and fix issues. 

• Alerty monitors databases such as Supabase, PostgreSQL, and RDS
• Tracking key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption
• It features quick incident management and Real User Monitoring (RUM) to optimize user experience
• Its universal service monitoring covers dependencies like Stripe API, OpenAI, and Vercel 

Alerty uses AI to simplify setup, providing a cost-effective solution compared to competitors. It is designed for ease of use, allowing quick setup, and integrates with tools like Sentry, making it ideal for developers and small teams needing efficient, affordable monitoring. 

Catch issues before they affect your users with Alerty's free APM solution today!

2. DataDog

DataDog is a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform offering a comprehensive solution for:

• Monitoring applications
• Infrastructure
• Network performance

The platform integrates multiple data sources, including:

• Logs
• Metrics
• Traces
• Synthetic monitoring

Providing a centralized view of all data for enhanced monitoring efficiency. DataDog offers features that make it suitable for monitoring dynamic and large environments effectively, such as:

• Alerts
• Dashboards
• Machine learning-based anomaly detection

DataDog provides a robust monitoring and analytics platform with broad data source integration capabilities, while Grafana focuses on data visualization and dashboarding functionalities. 

3. NewRelic

NewRelic is a robust solution that delivers real-time monitoring and analysis of applications and their underlying infrastructure. The platform offers detailed insights into application performance, including request tracing, error tracking, and transaction monitoring. NewRelic supports features to enhance its effectiveness in monitoring and optimizing performance like:

• Alerts
• Custom dashboards
• Historical performance analysis

When compared to Grafana, New Relic provides a more comprehensive solution for application performance monitoring, focusing on real-time data visualization and alerting across various data sources. 

4. Instana

Instana is an AI-powered application performance management (APM) solution that automatically discovers, maps, and monitors application components, dependencies, and infrastructure. This comprehensive view of application performance includes transaction traces, code-level visibility, and metrics from various sources:

• Infrastructure
• Application servers
• Databases
• Cloud services

Instana also boasts real-time alerting and anomaly detection powered by its AI engine, enabling quick identification and resolution of performance issues. When comparing Instana to Grafana, Instana provides a more comprehensive APM solution focused on:

• Application performance monitoring
• Real-time alerting
• Anomaly detection

If you require a tool that offers a complete view of application performance in real time, Instana is a solid choice. Grafana is better suited for flexible dashboarding and visualization needs.

5. Kibana

Kibana is an open user interface that lets you visualize your Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack. Kibana is written in JavaScript, making it an excellent choice for developers and non-developers alike. Kibana allows you to search Elasticsearch data for specific events and visualize them using:

• Charts
• Tables
• Geographical maps and more

Just like Grafana, Kibana allows users to create customized dashboards for various purposes. It also provides anomaly detection and alerting to monitor applications.

6. Cyclotron

Cyclotron is a browser-based platform for creating dashboards. It allows you to query and visualize your metrics no matter where they are stored. Cyclotron makes it easy for non-technical users to create and share data-driven insights and information without having to rely on technical expertise. 

It provides standard boilerplate and plumbing, allowing non-programmers to easily create and edit dashboards using customizable components. It has a built-in dashboard editor and hosts the dashboards directly.

Dashboards are defined declaratively as JSON documents containing all the properties required to render the Dashboard. One of the critical features of Cyclotron is its ability to integrate with a variety of data sources, including:

• Spreadsheets
• Databases
• Cloud-based data services like Google Analytics and Salesforce

This allows users to access the data they need without relying on IT or data engineering teams.

7. OpenSearch Dashboards

OpenSearch Dashboards is the default visualization tool in OpenSearch. OpenSearch is a community-built, open-source search and analytics suite derived from Elasticsearch and Kibana. OpenSearch allows you to:

• Ingest
• Search
• Aggregate
• View
• Analyze data for uses such as log analysis

OpenSearch dashboards is a user interface for OpenSearch plugins such as:

• Security
• Alerts
• SQL and more

OpenSearch Dashboards offers a forked version of Kibana 7.10.2, enhanced by various community-sourced add-ons and plugins. The best advantages over Kibana are compliance with the following:

• SOC 2
• CMMC
• NIST

8. D3.js

D3.js is a JavaScript library that allows you to visualize data using:

• HTML
• SVG
• CSS

It respects web standards, allowing you to work with modern web browser frameworks and leverage DOM manipulation. D3 is one of the fastest tools out there and supports large datasets. Thanks to its wide community, you can reuse it with a broad collection of official and community-developed modules.

9. Observable

Observable allows you to explore, analyze, and visualize data. It offers multiple visualization methods and a great platform for its community to develop custom templates. Observable was founded by the developers of D3.js in 2016, leveraging their previous work and adding much more. 

Now, Observable allows you to create basically any visualization you want, depending on your coding skills and the templates available. Observable has a huge community of contributors who create their own data visualizations, and their staff offers curated picks depending on what data they work with.

10. Power BI

Power BI is a visualization and analysis platform that allows you to gain deeper insight into data. It’s designed in a familiar, Microsoft Office-ish UI and, logically, works best as a part of a bundle alongside Azure and Office. Power BI offers more than 500 free connections, allowing you to connect to data sources such as:

• Dynamics 365
• Azure SQL Database
• Salesforce
• Excel
• SharePoint

It’s made to visualize and analyze data, but you can also use it to embed data in your applications. Power BI starts with:

• PRO plan at $9.99/user/month and is a part of Microsoft 365 E5
• Premium is priced either per user or per capacity
• Per-user pricing starts at $20, licenses at $4,995.

11. Redash

Redash is a powerful open-source project that allows you to connect and query data sources and visualize them in dashboards. Redash offers integrations with the most popular databases and platforms. Redash enables SQL users to:

• Explore
• Query
• Visualize
• Share data from any data sources

Redash also allows you to define conditions and be alerted instantly when your data changes. Redash is written in Python and provides a web interface to build and share dashboards. It has no extra dependencies. Redash allows you to choose from a vast amount of visualization options, such as:

• Graphs
• Tables
• Heatmaps

Redash is a more general-purpose data visualization tool, while Grafana is geared towards time-series data and infrastructure monitoring. Your choice will depend on your use case's specific needs and requirements.

12. Prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system with flexible query language and real-time alerting. It records metrics in a time series database using an HTTP pull model. Prometheus pulls metrics from monitored targets at given intervals, allowing you to monitor CPU, memory, disk space usage, and more. 

Flexible Querying and Alerting with Prometheus

Prometheus offers a powerful query language to query and aggregate metrics; for example, you can select a list of running threads sorted by CPU usage. You can also configure alerts to be notified when, for example, filesystem usage reaches a certain threshold. Most Prometheus components are written in Go, making them easy to build and deploy as static binaries. 

Scalable and Collaborative Monitoring

Prometheus has a decentralized architecture, making it scalable and fault-tolerant. It collects, stores, and queries metrics, while Grafana visualizes and analyzes the data. Both tools complement each other, making it possible to build a complete monitoring solution that provides a deep understanding of the system's performance.

13. InfluxDB

InfluxDB is a scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time analytics. InfluxDB does not replace Grafana, but you can use it as a Grafana data source. Grafana and InfluxDB are both open-source tools used for monitoring and observability. 

They have different purposes and are typically used together in a monitoring solution. 

• InfluxDB is written in Go, supports pluggable extensions, and comes with clients and libraries for the most popular programming languages and frameworks. 
• InfluxDB is schemaless, so you can add new fields on the fly without changing your data model. 
• You can use a powerful query language called InfluxQL to analyze your data in many ways.

14. VictoriaMetrics

VictoriaMetrics can be used as a drop-in replacement for Prometheus. It supports PromQL and MetricsQL for reading data and evaluating alerting rules. VictoriaMetrics supports the Prometheus pull model and various push protocols, such as:

• Graphite
• InfluxDB
• OpenTSDB
• More for data ingestion

VictoriaMetrics is a time-series database designed to store, query, and process large amounts of metrics data with high performance and reliability. It's well-suited for storing time-series data from sources like Prometheus and can handle high write and query loads. VictoriaMetrics also supports advanced features such as:

• Data retention policies
• Continuous queries
• Complex query language

VictoriaMetrics is written in Go and consists of a small executable without external dependencies.

15. Sematext

Sematext allows the detection and troubleshooting of production & performance issues with:

• Logs
• Metrics
• Synthetic
• Real user monitoring

Dashboards and infrastructure metrics (e.g., shared databases and NoSQL stores, servers, containers, etc.) come out of the box and can be customized. Sematext also provides powerful alerting with anomaly detection and scheduling. It provides actionable insights and alerts in real time, so you can resolve issues quickly.

16. Tableau

Tableau offers a powerful analytics and data visualization solution suitable for most data science and business uses. It allows you to discover trends using:

• Machine learning algorithms
• Statistics
• Natural language
• Data prep

A Versatile Data Visualization Platform

• Tableau is based on scientific research concerning how to make analysis more efficient. 
• Tableau is flexible and scalable, offers enterprise-grade security, and offers an extensible platform. 
• Tableau offers VizQL, a visual query language for databases. 
• It’s a translator that translates SQL queries and returns in numbers and tables into visual analysis. 
• For each drag-and-drop action you perform, VizQL interprets it as a query and then renders it as a Tableau visual. 

Tableau is a Salesforce product and offers multiple pricing plans. It depends on whether you are a group or an individual or want to have Tableau embedded.

17. QlikView

Qlik(click)View is a guided analytics solution for creating interactive applications and dashboards. It integrates data from multiple sources and makes it available via your network, ensuring the right information reaches the right person. You navigate data by clicking, which helps you process information in your way. 

QlikView allows you to create a centralized overview of your data in multiple storages and databases, whether yours or someone else’s and can be integrated with practically any database. Qlikview allows you to: 

• Create a flexible end-user interface for an information warehouse
• Get snapshots of data relations
• Make data-based presentations
• Create dynamic graphs, charts, tables, and much more
• You can also use it to create your custom BI tool

18. Knowi

Knowi offers native support for Elasticsearch and also supports other (No)SQL and REST API sources. Instead of the usual ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), Knowi virtualized data, which allows it to connect to any source in real-time and save resources. Knowi also allows you to work with unstructured data. 

Since its founding in 2015, Knowi has become one of the most powerful BI tools. It supports over 30 visualizations and allows you to create your own using JavaScript. Knowi offers custom annual pricing plans, but you need to contact their sales team to obtain them.

19. Datawrapper

Datawrapper allows you to visualize data in:

• Charts
• Maps
• Tables

You can pick from 19 interactive and responsive chart types, ranging from bars to scatter plots. Three different maps are available, allowing you to display geospatial data logically. Several of its responsive data tables will enable you to create:

• Bar
• Column
• Line charts
• Heatmaps

Datawrapper requires no previous coding skills; you only need to paste data in a structured format and use their UI to customize your final visual. Datawrapper offers:

• Unlimited visualizations
• Collaboration features
• Print-ready formats
• Multiple export formats
• Support for mobile devices

20. Knime

Knime allows you to analyze and visualize thanks to a modern approach to analytics. It combines machine learning and artificial intelligence-based approaches with classic statistical analysis and data mining methods. By combining all of that alongside R and Python integrations, Knime offers a robust, open-source analytics platform.

Knime ensures that your data is explainable at every step and state, meaning that you will always understand where it came from and how it was processed. This allows you to get consistent results over time.

21. Dygraphs

Dygraphs is an open-source JavaScript library for charting. It allows you to explore and visualize data using a simple set of commands.

• It lets you handle massive data sets and plot millions of points quickly. 
• Offers out-of-the-box interactivity, meaning you can zoom, pan, and mouse over your charts by default. 

Since it’s a library, it offers almost no restrictions, which makes it a highly customizable tool. All recent browsers support dygraphs and even touchscreen functions such as pinch-to-zoom.

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Criteria To Consider When Choosing A Grafana Alternative

Open Source vs. Commercial Software

When looking for a Grafana alternative, you can choose between open-source tools like Kibana, which provides community support and customization options, or commercial software like Alerty, which offers comprehensive cloud visibility features and dedicated 24/7 support services. 

Ease of Use

Consider the Grafana alternative's user-friendliness, ensuring the platform can be used across teams regardless of their technical knowledge. Tools like Alerty offers:

• Intuitive interfaces
• Low learning curves
• Detailed documentation

Integrations

Analyze the Grafana alternative's integration capabilities with your existing tool stack. A good observability tool should seamlessly integrate with your current tools and systems to provide a complete picture of your infrastructure.

Data Handling

Evaluate whether the platform can effectively handle large volumes and complex datasets. Choose a tool to manage high data volumes and complex environments to meet your business's evolving needs.

Customization Capability

Examine each Grafana alternative's customization features and ability to:

• Build custom reports
• Dashboards
• Alerts tailored to your specific business requirements

Scalability

Select a tool that can scale with your dynamic business needs and perform reliably even under heavy loads. Your chosen observability tool should be able to grow with your organization without compromising performance.

Pricing

While not all Grafana alternatives offer transparent pricing, consider a tool with a flexible pricing structure that fits your budget. Tools like Datadog may be expensive due to pricing based on data volume, whereas Alerty offers a more cost-effective option.

Customer Support

Evaluate the customer and community support each Grafana alternative provides to ensure a smooth setup and operations experience. Exceptional customer support can significantly improve the tool's overall usability and effectiveness.

Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users with Alerty's Free APM Solution

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service specifically tailored for developers and early-stage startups, offering a range of monitoring capabilities to ensure the smooth operation of applications. With a focus on:

• Application performance monitoring
• Database monitoring
• Incident management

Alerty is a versatile tool that can support a variety of technologies commonly used in the development world. 

Comprehensive Monitoring for Modern Development Stacks

Alerty supports technologies, making it an ideal choice for developers working with these frameworks such as:

• NextJS
• React
• Vue
• Node.js

By monitoring databases like Supabase, PostgreSQL, and RDS, Alerty offers valuable insights into critical metrics such as CPU usage and memory consumption, allowing developers to optimize their applications for performance and efficiency. 

Proactive Issue Management and User Experience Optimization

One of Alerty's standout features is its quick incident management capabilities, which enable developers to identify and address issues promptly before they escalate and impact end-users. Including Real User Monitoring (RUM) functionality allows developers to gain valuable insights into the user experience, helping them optimize their applications for better performance and usability.

Beyond Application Monitoring: Tracking Dependencies for Resilient Systems

Alerty's universal service monitoring extends beyond standard application and database monitoring, covering dependencies like:

• Stripe API
• OpenAI
• Vercel

This comprehensive approach ensures that developers can monitor all aspects of their applications' performance and dependencies, leading to a more robust and reliable system overall. 

AI-Powered Simplicity

Alerty utilizes AI technology to streamline the monitoring setup process, making it easy for developers to get started quickly and efficiently with minimal hassle. This focus on simplicity and ease of use sets Alerty apart from its competitors, providing a cost-effective solution for developers and small teams looking for efficient and affordable monitoring tools. 

Alerty: Your Partner for Optimal Application Performance

Alerty is an excellent choice for developers and small teams seeking comprehensive monitoring capabilities, ease of use, and affordability in a cloud monitoring service. By leveraging its powerful features and integrations with tools like Sentry, Alerty enables developers to catch issues before they impact users, ensuring smooth operation and optimal application performance.

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