Grafana vs. NetApp Cloud Insights

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

For example, we had an application slowdown. It looked like the slowdown was storage. However, it was a malformed SQL query that no one realized was pulling data from the storage location that also housed the application. Cloud Insights saved us hours of downtime and frustration. Cloud Insights pinpointed which system was hogging resources. What makes Cloud Insights special is the way it looks at the data collected from the data sources. The insights it provides into the flow of data; sheds new light on how things work in your environment.

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

• The visibility and usage optimization are the most valuable features.
• Ease to use for basic functionality.
• It is good for giving an overview of the systems and for tracking long-term trends. It is handy for root cause analysis.

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.

• Need to add more cloud resources for optimization, as many are still not compatible
• Data retention time is limited.
• Premium subscription is costly.

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

I have been extremely happy with its usability. You can take thins as they are out of the box and it is useful. You can carry it as far as you want to go and every step you take improves your ROI.

Incentivized

1. It's very easy to contact the customer support service, and they seem to be very happy to help at any time.
2. Timeliness of the support's response. Support is very active when responding to the customer's complaint or queries.
3. Technical support always provided the solutions to the problems encountered.
4. Overall customer support quality is good.

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

For a while, we were using Zabbix to monitor our Kubernetes applications and microservices on our infrastructure in more than one public cloud platform. Cloud Insights has much better visualized dashboards. In addition, despite such a large number of quality features, it's still priced competitively.

Incentivized

Once you install the acquisition unit and start collecting data, you can immediately begin using it. It is very self-explanatory and helpful. I could have used Cloud Insights without working with the NetApp Cloud Insights support team. I am glad I engaged them though. They helped me carry Cloud Insights to a new level and it fast-tracked the process that would have taken me time to complete.

Incentivized

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

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• Performance and security have improved
• Cloud Secure lets you get real-time alerts on any security breach, like a ransomware attack or something similar
• You can easily notice if something weird is happening on the cloud and later prevent that

Incentivized