Grafana vs Scout APM comparison

Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics platform that stands out in the field of monitoring solutions. Grafana is widely recognized for its powerful, easy-to-set-up dashboards and visualizations. Grafana supports integration with a wide array of data sources and tools, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, MySQL, Splunk, and Elasticsearch, enhancing its versatility. Grafana has open-source and cloud options; the open-source version is a good choice for organizations with the resources to manage their infrastructure and want more control over their deployment. The cloud service is a good choice if you want a fully managed solution that is easy to start with and scale.

A key strength of Grafana lies in its ability to explore, visualize, query, and alert on the collected data through operational dashboards. These dashboards are highly customizable and visually appealing, making them a valuable asset for data analysis, performance tracking, trend spotting, and detecting irregularities.

Grafana provides both an open-source solution with an active community and Grafana Cloud, a fully managed and composable observability offering that packages together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. The open-source version is licensed under the Affero General Public License version 3.0 (AGPLv3), being free and unlimited. Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise are available for more advanced needs, catering to a wider range of organizational requirements. Grafana offers options for self-managed backend systems or fully managed services via Grafana Cloud. Grafana Cloud extends observability with a wide range of solutions for infrastructure monitoring, IRM, load testing, Kubernetes monitoring, continuous profiling, frontend observability, and more.

The Grafana users we interviewed generally appreciate Grafana's ability to connect with various data sources, its straightforward usability, and its integration capabilities, especially in developer-oriented environments. The platform is noted for its practical alert configurations, ticketing backend integration, and as a powerful tool for developing dashboards. However, some users find a learning curve in the initial setup and mention the need for time investment to customize and leverage Grafana effectively. There are also calls for clearer documentation and simplification of notification alert templates.

In summary, Grafana is a comprehensive solution for data visualization and monitoring, widely used across industries for its versatility, ease of use, and extensive integration options. It suits organizations seeking a customizable and scalable platform for visualizing time-series data from diverse sources. However, users should be prepared for some complexity in setup and customization and may need to invest time in learning and tailoring the system to their specific needs.

Scout APM is an application performance monitoring solution that simplifies the troubleshooting process by enabling developers to discover and repair performance problems before clients ever notice them. Scout APM uses a developer-based UI with real-time alerting and intuitive tracing logic to identify bottlenecks precisely to the source code. This helps to greatly reduce time and effort needed to debug code and results in greater productivity and improved outcomes.

Scout APM facilitates the ability of developers to break down, discover, and prioritize performance issues such as N+1 queries, latent database queries, memory bloat, and more, and accomplishes these results at a fraction of the cost. Scout APM monitors Elixir, Node.js, PHP, Python and Ruby.

Scout APM is built by developers, for developers.

Scout APM Features

• 24/7 monitoring: Continuous, consistent monitoring proactively keeps users apprised of any performance deviations. Intuitive dashboards allow users to deep-dive into specific requests, paths, users, and endpoints attached to any performance slowdowns or bloating.
  
  
• Quick and easy analysis: Should a slowdown occur or an increased response time be discovered, users have an easy to use drag-and-drop option to simply and quickly analyze every endpoint and dissect any anomalies. Scout APM will pinpoint the precise user or endpoint(s) responsible for the problem.
  
  
• Intuitive trace logic: Users are able to quickly deep-dive and discover slow requests based on average responses or any/all requests.
  
  
• Crossfilter powerhouse: Crossfilter is a Scout APM feature that allows users to quickly discover similarities with any/all slow requests back to the user or endpoint.
  
  
• Easily discover bottlenecks: With Scout APM, users can easily pinpoint bottlenecks to the exact source code without any additional custom instrumentation. The solution uses a production-safe profiler to fully examine users' custom codes.
  
  
• Developer tracing: Scout APM uses backtraces that are embedded with git blame output so developers of the code can be quickly identified and contacted to resolve issues and concerns immediately.
  
  
• Cost-effective: Scout APM is an open-source solution and offers many flexible pricing options to meet any size business, from small to enterprise level, including custom options. The cost per transaction decreases based on usage and works very efficiently with applications with very high throughput. Scout APM also offers a free trial period and encourages its usage so users can best understand and gauge the level of service needed and determine the best pricing plan to meet organizational needs. Scout APM is considered to be significantly cheaper than many other APM solutions in the marketplace today.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution is stable. It's pretty easy to set up, especially if you have the knowledge base and/or you have a partner assist you. The product can scale. The processes are great. It helps with services and microservices. The product is great for many different industries, including energy, government, finance, and more. It's allowed our company to be more forward-thinking and to consider the future a bit more. ” - Antonio B., Regional Manager LatAm at Splunk