Grafana vs. Metabase

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

Very well-suited in growing organizations, at a company of the size I work at it is the perfect solution in terms of functionality and cost. Compared to other solutions like PowerBI etc, which can run into the hundreds of thousands just to implement, Metabase is fantastic. In terms of scalability, as we grow, there will be inevitable questions over how well we can grow with Metabase.

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).

• Store Data
• Make Querying easy
• Quickly ingest data from many sources

Incentivized

• Functions to customize values
• Improved user experience

Incentivized

• Report Types
• Updates
• Colour/Branding

Incentivized

Its generally quite easy to use but some SQL is definitely important

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

I used Looker in a previous role and found it clunky, difficult to navigate, hard to collaborate on, and ultimately massively expensive. I evaluated Looker to see if it would be right to implement it as a solution in my current role, but Metabase was the clear winner - the ease of use, cost, functionality, and simple report exploration made it an easy decision.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• We can make great reports for our customers quickly
• We can store customer data dynamically
• we can create customer specific metrics

Incentivized