Grafana vs. Looker Studio

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

Does great at open canvas editing and letting you fully customize without the need for a grid. It is democratizing self-service no-code analytics. You do not need to be a data or analytics engineer to get started, and you can go very far based on how intuitive and straightforward the UI is. Some of the biggest challenges with Looker Studio relate to user management/security, embedding options, and issue support. For a long time, every user needed to have a Gmail to invite them to view a dashboard via login, not sure if that has been improved yet. You can let any user view without logging in, but that is not always recommended due to security reasons. In terms of embedding, you can only iframe dashboards. More sophisticated BI tools let you embed elements via API or Javascript. Iframing dashboards also make drill downs and dashboard to dashboard navigation tricky/near impossible. There is also no ability to contact Google for support when bugs or outages happen. They point everyone to the Data Studio community. There is some ability to get in contact with Google if you have an enterprise-level contract with Google Cloud, but the path for support is very ad hoc and not always fruitful.

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).

• Self-service
• Easy to use, point and click
• Little to no training required
• Easy to share internally and externally
• Rich visualizations
• Canned reports
• Easy to copy/paste/dupe existing reports
• Ability to join data sets
• Easy integration with various data sources
• Flexible data integrations, including lowest common denominator (CSV, XLS, G-Sheets)
• Wide range of APIs
• Secure / authentication via Google SSO
• Easy to share / re-assign ownership of reports and data sources

Incentivized

• Functions to customize values
• Improved user experience

Incentivized

• Few functionalities are very exclusive only for data studio.
• It's time taking to load data and at the same time only single Data source can be connected.
• When editing the reports you have to switch between Edit and View mode to see how does the change looks like.

It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration

Incentivized

Google Data Studio has a clean interface that follows a lot of UX best practices. It is fairly easy to pick up the first time you use it, and there is a lot of documentation on line to help troubleshoot, if needed

Incentivized

I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.

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 Data Studio provides a great feature set considering its price point, especially when compared to commercial options from Microsoft and Tableau. While it may not be as versatile when it comes to working with and developing complex datasets, there is enough charm in its simple, easy-to-use UI to allow not-so-complex analytics to be conducted without having to hire a data analyst.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Free, so the only investment is time
• Because it doesn't have native support of non-Google sources, it can cost more money than Tableau
• The time spent formatting the templates or building connectors can have a negative impact on ROI
• As a agency, charging for the reporting service is profitable after the first month or two after building the dashboard.

Incentivized