Grafana vs. Micro Focus Diagnostics (discontinued)

If I was starting over on an Observability platform, Grafana would be my number 1 choice due to the flexibility and ability to act as a single platform either on its own or combining multiple data sources. The trick however, is that it can be fairly complex to learn and setup, so time is needed to make it a successful implementation. There is a level of cognitive load required

Incentivized

I would say on 90% of our agent installs everything works without any modification. If the application however makes a large use of memory based cache and analysis that classes will need to be excluded from instrumentation or it will impact performance.

Incentivized

• 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

• Agent level customization - For highly performant applications we can easily exclude instrumentation, yet still receive the benefit of historical tracking on common data points like CPU, Heap and GC cycles.
• Support - In the 5+ years working with the product any HP solution engagements have been quick to provide a needed configuration solution.
• Agent Diversity - Have used the product across 6+ differing middleware technologies comprising dozens of version (both middleware and java) combinations.
• Agent installation - With its ability to support a silent type install, automating was a simple task.

Incentivized

• 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.

• The product does offer a lot of functionality - This can lead to a cluttered user interface and does take some time to become comfortable and proficient in its use.
• Data Volume - We have had some issues in balancing the desire to keep all data and consuming infrastructure storage.

Incentivized

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

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

While it has been several years since using BMC Patrol I like that HP doesn't require me to have a custom module added for every different type of product I would like to instrument.

Incentivized

• Time-consuming reports reduced
• Spotting trends in services
• Preventive maintenance

Incentivized

• Performance Tuning - Product is fully integrated to provide baseline and drift across releases.

Incentivized