Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Grafana VS Apache SkyWalking

Compare Grafana VS Apache SkyWalking and see what are their differences

Grafana logo Grafana

Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Apache SkyWalking logo Apache SkyWalking

Apache SkyWalking is an open-source application performance monitoring solution that provides tracking, metrics analysis, service mesh observability, alarm, and visualization.
  • Grafana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • Apache SkyWalking Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-21

Grafana

$ Details
Release Date
2014 January
Startup details
Country
United States
State
New York
City
New York
Founder(s)
Anthony Woods
Employees
100 - 249

Grafana features and specs

  • Customizable Dashboards
    Grafana provides highly customizable and flexible dashboards, allowing users to create and arrange panels in a way that best represents their metrics and data.
  • Wide Range of Data Sources
    Grafana supports numerous data sources including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Graphite, AWS CloudWatch, and more, making it versatile and adaptable to various data environments.
  • Rich Plugin Ecosystem
    The platform offers a rich ecosystem of plugins for data visualization, data sources, and apps, enabling users to extend its functionality to suit specific needs.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source tool, Grafana is free to use and customize, allowing organizations to tailor it to their specific requirements without licensing costs.
  • Alerting System
    Grafana comes with a powerful alerting system that can notify users about important events through various channels like email, Slack, and PagerDuty.
  • Community and Support
    Grafana has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials to help users solve issues and improve their dashboards.

Possible disadvantages of Grafana

  • Learning Curve
    The extensive customization features and numerous data sources can be overwhelming for new users, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Performance Issues with Large Datasets
    When dealing with very large datasets or high-cardinality data, performance issues can arise, requiring additional tuning or more powerful infrastructure.
  • Limited Built-in Data Storage
    Grafana itself does not store data; it relies on external data sources. This could necessitate using additional services or infrastructure for data storage.
  • Complex Setup for Alerting
    Setting up and managing the alerting system can be complicated, especially for users who are not familiar with monitoring and alerting concepts.
  • Dependence on External Data Sources
    The effectiveness of Grafana depends heavily on the quality and stability of the external data sources it connects to, which can be a point of failure.
  • Cost for Enterprise Features
    While the open-source version is free, advanced features and support are available only in the paid enterprise version, which could be costly for some organizations.

Apache SkyWalking features and specs

  • Comprehensive Observability
    Apache SkyWalking provides end-to-end observability of distributed systems including service, process, and container metrics, as well as logs and events, enabling holistic monitoring and performance optimization.
  • Distributed Tracing
    SkyWalking offers robust distributed tracing capabilities that allow users to trace requests end-to-end across various services and platforms, aiding in root cause analysis and performance monitoring.
  • Open Source
    Being an open-source project under the Apache umbrella, SkyWalking benefits from community contributions, regular updates, and improvements, offering transparency and flexibility.
  • Wide Protocol Support
    SkyWalking supports a wide range of protocols and platforms, such as HTTP, gRPC, Dubbo, and supports multiple languages including Java, .NET, Python, and more, making it versatile across different tech stacks.
  • Dashboarding and Visualization
    The platform provides powerful dashboards and visualization tools, allowing users to easily interpret data, create custom dashboards, and derive insights from visual metrics.

Possible disadvantages of Apache SkyWalking

  • Complex Setup
    Setting up and configuring SkyWalking can be complex, especially for organizations unfamiliar with distributed observability tools, potentially requiring significant time and expertise.
  • Scalability Challenges
    While SkyWalking is designed for distributed systems, scaling its deployment for very large environments might present challenges, necessitating careful architectural planning.
  • Resource Intensive
    SkyWalking can be resource-intensive, as it collects a large amount of telemetry data, which might lead to high overhead on system resources like CPU and memory.
  • Learning Curve
    Due to its comprehensive feature set and various configurations, there can be a steep learning curve associated with effectively utilizing SkyWalking, particularly for new users.
  • Limited UI Customization
    The user interface, while functional, offers limited customization options compared to some commercial observability solutions, which might be a limitation for users needing highly tailored dashboards.

Grafana videos

Grafana vs Kibana | Beautiful data graphs and log analysis systems

More videos:

  • Review - Business Dashboards with Grafana and MySQL
  • Review - Grafana Labs 2019 Year in Review

Apache SkyWalking videos

Chapter04 Session10 - Apache Skywalking by Sheng Wu

More videos:

  • Review - Apache SkyWalking | Top 42 Alternatives of Apache SkyWalking
  • Review - Observability in Service Mesh Powered by Envoy and Apache SkyWalking - Sheng Wu & Lizan Zhou

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Grafana and Apache SkyWalking)
Monitoring Tools
92 92%
8% 8
Data Dashboard
100 100%
0% 0
Log Management
89 89%
11% 11
Development
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Grafana and Apache SkyWalking. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Grafana and Apache SkyWalking

Grafana Reviews

Self Hosting Like Its 2025
If you’re looking for straightforward monitoring and the thought of setting up a full Zabbix or Grafana stack seems daunting, this software is a real lifesaver. With just one deployment, you can monitor your services and receive notifications through a wide variety of channels including…
Source: kiranet.org
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
Middleware is one such Grafana alternative that offers robust data monitoring and visualization capabilities at affordable prices. Though it’s commercial, unlike Grafana, its rich feature set ensures accommodating your present and future business needs.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Are you looking for Grafana alternatives? Then you have come to the right place. Grafana started as a data visualization tool. It slowly evolved into a tool that can take data from multiple data sources for visualization. For observability, Grafana offers the LGTM stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). You need to configure...
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
For this reason, many have set out in search of Grafana alternatives. Since you’ve landed yourself here, I’m guessing that you’re one of those people. Fear not! We’ve put together a comprehensive list of the 10 best Grafana alternatives out there today.
Source: sematext.com
Top 10 Tableau Open Source Alternatives: A Comprehensive List
When it comes to visualization, Grafana is a great tool for visualizing time series data with support for various databases including Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Graphite. It is also compatible with relational databases such as MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. While Tableau can do the same thing, Grafana’s open-source status allows the users to add additional data sources and...
Source: hevodata.com

Apache SkyWalking Reviews

We have no reviews of Apache SkyWalking yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Grafana seems to be a lot more popular than Apache SkyWalking. While we know about 238 links to Grafana, we've tracked only 18 mentions of Apache SkyWalking. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Grafana mentions (238)

  • Send Node.js logs from Docker to Grafana Cloud with Alloy
    Navigate to Grafana Cloud and sign up or log in. In the sidebar, select Connections → Add new connection, select Loki. This is the place that prompts you to set up your Loki connection and allows you to generate an access token for Alloy. - Source: dev.to / 1 day ago
  • Monitoring API Requests and Responses for System Health
    Prometheus + Grafana: Open-source tools that offer maximum flexibility without ongoing licensing costs—ideal for teams willing to manage their own infrastructure and configuration. - Source: dev.to / 4 days ago
  • How to Optimize Your Fintech API in 2025: A Guide
    Prometheus: This open-source monitoring solution pairs with Grafana for powerful custom visualization of exactly what matters to your business. - Source: dev.to / 4 days ago
  • Monitoring Docker Hub limits with Prometheus
    Grafana Is used to visualize metrics, logs, traces, and by the time you read this probably other things 😄. - Source: dev.to / 7 days ago
  • 3 Types of Chaos Experiments and How To Run Them
    Utilize monitoring solutions like Prometheus, Grafana, or Datadog to monitor how services communicate under normal and failure conditions. Service meshes like Istio or Linkerd can provide detailed insights without changing your application code. - Source: dev.to / 9 days ago
View more

Apache SkyWalking mentions (18)

  • I gave up on self-hosted Sentry
    A good APM tool I’ve been using for a few years is Apache Skywalking: https://skywalking.apache.org/ It might not do everything Sentry does but it definitely has helped with tracking down some issues, even production ones and runs in a fairly manageable setup (in comparison to how long even the Sentry self-hosted Docker Compose file is). What’s more, if you want, you can even use regular PostgreSQL as the backing... - Source: Hacker News / 15 days ago
  • OpenTelemetry Tracing in < 200 lines of code
    > I maintain that any platform that isn’t using some sort of tracing system is practically negligent in their engineering duty. For some, it's difficult because many of the self-hostable out there are rather complex and have high requirements, like https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-compose.yml but it's not exactly ideal either. I wonder what other good options are out there, something... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • 14 Monitoring Tools for Full-Stack Developers
    Apache SkyWalking is an open-source APM tool meant for distributed systems. It has support for distributed tracing, agents in multiple languages, and support for an eBPF agent. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Release Radar · May 2024 Edition: Major updates from the open source community
    Are you working on microservices, cloud native, and container-based architectures? Then you need to check out Apache Skywalking. It's an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) system, that provides monitoring, tracing, and diagnosing capabilities for distributed systems in Cloud Native architectures. This latest update has hundreds of changes including support for Java 21 runtime, new functions and parameters,... - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Enhancing API Observability Series (Part 3): Tracing
    When choosing distributed tracing tools, considerations include your technology stack, business requirements, and monitoring complexity. Zipkin, SkyWalking, and OpenTelemetry are popular distributed tracing solutions, each with its unique features. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Grafana and Apache SkyWalking, you can also consider the following products

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

SigNoz - Open source alternative to Datadog

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

Open Telemetry - An observability framework for cloud-native software.

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.