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Free-Limited
Tool Comparison
Grafana
The open-source platform for beautiful, actionable monitoring dashboards.
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At a Glance
| Attribute | Grafana | Elastic Observability |
|---|---|---|
| License / Pricing | Free-Limited | Free-Limited |
| Type | DevOps | DevOps |
| GitHub Stars | — | — |
| Rating | 4.6/5 | 4.3/5 |
| Key Features | 6 listed | 6 listed |
| Integrations | 5 listed | 5 listed |
| Categories | MonitoringObservability | ObservabilityMonitoringLogging |
Key Features
Grafana
- 50+ native data source connectors: Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, InfluxDB, and more
- Rich panel library: graphs, heatmaps, tables, gauges, and stat panels
- Dashboard-as-code with JSON and Grafonnet for version control
- Unified alerting across all connected data sources
- Grafana Loki for cost-effective log aggregation
- Grafana Tempo for distributed tracing alongside metrics
Elastic Observability
- Elasticsearch for fast, scalable log and metric storage
- Kibana for visualisation, dashboards, and alert management
- Elastic APM for distributed tracing and application performance monitoring
- Beats and Elastic Agent for lightweight data collection from any source
- Machine learning for anomaly detection on log and metric streams
- OpenTelemetry compatible for vendor-neutral data ingestion
Real-World Use Cases
Grafana
Full-stack observability for a microservice
Connect Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for traces
Infrastructure capacity planning
Pull node and pod CPU and memory metrics from Prometheus
Elastic Observability
Centralised log management for microservices
Deploy Filebeat as a DaemonSet to collect container logs from all Kubernetes nodes
APM tracing for a Python application
Install the Elastic APM Python agent: pip install elastic-apm
Integrations
Grafana
prometheuselastic-observabilitydatadognewrelickubernetes
Elastic Observability
kubernetesprometheusgrafanadatadogansible
🏆 Which should you choose?
Choose Grafana if…
- → you're already in the Monitoring ecosystem and prefer Grafana's workflow
Choose Elastic Observability if…
- → you're already in the Observability ecosystem and prefer Elastic Observability's workflow