Chartio (discontinued) vs. Grafana

Chartio is a great tool for building presentable dashboards. It can export, you can add read-only access, and it has permissions levels by dashboard for users. There are other data analysis tools that help to analyze the data, but few allow for such a nice presentation

Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation

Incentivized

• Direct linkage to our databases. Abstracts away the visualization layer so we can focus on the data and the queries.
• Host of graphs and tools that permits all types of data visualizations.
• Haven't quite used this yet, but there is a new embedding feature that will be very helpful so that we can embed the charts into a company central dash.

• Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
• Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
• Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
• Microservices monitoring
• Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere

Incentivized

• There is not a last full month date range option. You can still get the range that you need, but the dashboards will have to be manually updated to exclusively display one whole month.
• When building a chart, the area which displays your tables and fields is finite. You can't adjust the size to make it easier to see. They do allow a mouse-over to see the entire name of your table/field, but I would prefer to adjust the width.
• Once you modify a query in the Custom Query tab, there doesn't seem to be a way to go back to using the U.I.

• There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
• We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
• In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.

Great customer support: You will receive an answer by email usually within 20-30 minutes. Not only that but our CSMs for Chartio go out of their way to help, they have even created charts for some of the less experienced users that wanted an example to work from. We have had nothing but great experiences with this team.

Incentivized

I really like using Chartio. I use it on a daily basis for pulling data from different sources and combining data (the explore tab was a great idea for this use). I think I would give it 8/10 because there needs to be more documentation or maybe blog posts about things people are doing with it. I only have my own ideas about what to do /how to graph things. I know there are some articles, but it would be awesome to have a section on the neat dashboards people are building or how they show data in different ways. Another complaint is how much time it takes to load. I know our databases aren't set up precisely for Chartio and I have been creating data stores. But the data stores have so many more limitations that adds a whole new layer of frustration. Love the product, keep up the good work and the fast fixes.

It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources

Incentivized

I use self learning materials. Pretty helpful. I find myself having to go back to the "drilldown" instructions though, and have a hard time finding hidden variables on a dashboard, so perhaps there is room for intuitive improvements (or maybe I'm just being lazy)

Chartio so far has been the easiest BI tool to setup and has also been the most affordable. There are some other, great, BI tools out there but they were a bit to heavy handed for what we needed. Also - despite the high cost per user in Chartio, the other tools were still more expensive.

Incentivized

Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.

Incentivized

Chartio has worked well as our datawarehouse has rapidly expanded, and the usability/performance hasn't seemed to have suffered. What we haven't yet realized is additional savings from additional users. We have some dashboard needs for users who truly just view of a few charts, and the licensing structure hasn't yet been structured in a way that would support that type of approach...having 50 "core" licenses, and then potentially several hundred view only licenses for partners that would use the application infrequently.

• Grafana has replaced many higher priced tools
• The integrations are seemless with multiple backends
• Combining graphs and dashboards from multiple data sources is a game changer

Incentivized