Google Charts vs. Grafana

We can easily recommend Google Charts to any company that needs a way to visually represent their data. Another great thing about Google Charts is that it is free to use and does not require any membership fees. Although it requires a skilled used to be able to use the charts, the results are great and can be beneficial to any company who is looking to make better decisions.

Grafana is a one stop solution for all application monitoring needs. In our organisation, we use nodeJs. We run it using pm2. Since we didn't use Grafana it was hard for us to know if an app has stopped working unless we find it ourselves because our other app components were failing, or someone called us up and told about the situation. We were already using Grafana for monitoring our Ubuntu servers, but we hadn't had set it up for our app monitoring. Somehow we decided to monitor our nodeJs app with Grafana. It's a really good decision we made. We used Grafana nodeJs module "prom-client" for our node app which brought us relief from app failing situations. Since we have implemented Grafana for our Node app, it has helped us to monitor every health aspect of our node app. Now we have set up alerts based on heap-memory, so when heap memory goes beyond a set threshold we get notified and take the right steps ultimately saving our app from crashing and of course from losing business and reputation.

Incentivized

• they're free with Google suite and they have backing in terms of powerful Google apps which can be plugged in to perform multiple actions like using Google sheets to import raw data into Google Charts
• they're the most simple app to use when it comes to creating charts and visual dashboards
• ease of customization
• ease of using custom APIs from developers side to help make any types of charts and dashboards you want

Incentivized

• It visualizes metrics very well coming from any well known data source.
• It sends alerts to collaboration channels when a threshold is breeched.
• Graphs and dashboards are portable (Graph-as-a-Code).

• I would like a couple more introductory videos or a live chat option for when you run into an issue. I think this is a Google-wide problem, not only linked to Google Charts.
• I have run into some issues with the Dynamic Data but also admittedly could potentially dive in deeper and investigate.
• It would be great if Google Charts made it possible to integrate Google Chat into the platform.

Incentivized

• Functions to customize values
• Improved user experience

Incentivized

Google Charts is a good product. It's widely supported with deep documentation and a large community. But for me, it wasn't customizable enough. When we started with simple charts, it was great, but as we got deeper and more complex, our needs outgrew the library. If I was going forward, I would choose a more barebones library with more freedom and extensibility.

Incentivized

Google Charts is about as easy to use as the rest of their applications. The UI is very well thought out, allowing you to add what you need, and customize it to your exact liking. The default theme is actually really nice, which helps as most of the time, customizing is not needed.

Incentivized

Google charts is always available and provides fast output.

Connectivity is occasionally very slow.

As a free tool with massively powerful, infinitely customisable charts that can be dynamically updated - Google Charts is my favourite data visualisation tool. However, my hatred of JavaScript does jade my view on it. This is the price of the tool though, and I'm glad it's available for me.

Incentivized

The online training was solely done through self training on google's guide to charts.

Easy to implement

Google Charts stacks up better since it is free and does not have the constant pressure for cost overruns, add-ons, annual maintenance and implementation services. The speed of using Google Charts is quick, saving users potentially weeks in getting up and going. For the readers of websites with limited resources, the application shows up nicely is look and feel with charts. Great way of showing data visually.

Incentivized

Grafana has a direct plugin to Icinga monitoring solution and allowed for easy configuration for us. At the time of implementation, other services did not have such an integration. As we already had a very customized and heavily introduced monitoring solution in place, we needed settings that could plug into the system quickly and efficiently. This was the case with Grafana and allowed us to have all the integrations we needed with services such as Icinga

Incentivized

Google Charts is essential for quick, easy, reporting. There are opportunities for advanced features.

• teams were easily able to create charts and find out progress on our learning courses and thus take actionable insights to their managers, professors
• students could also know their progress on various courses from one single view, same for instructors in terms of imparting education
• sales team could learn which kind of courses sold more to focus more on those areas

Incentivized

• Helps us to keep our application and server up all time
• Dashboards are easy to share with others

Incentivized