Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Grafana VS Azure Application Insights

Compare Grafana VS Azure Application Insights and see what are their differences

Grafana logo Grafana

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

Azure Application Insights logo Azure Application Insights

Azure Application Insights is an application performance management service that allows users to monitor live applications.
  • Grafana Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21
  • Azure Application Insights Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-19

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.

Azure Application Insights features and specs

  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Azure Application Insights offers detailed, real-time monitoring capabilities for web applications, covering metrics like request rates, response times, failed requests, and dependencies across multiple geographic locations.
  • Seamless Integration
    Integrates easily with other Azure services and third-party tools, enhancing the ease with which developers can incorporate this monitoring tool into their existing Azure environment.
  • Advanced Analytics
    Offers powerful analytics tools with integrated query capabilities, enabling users to write queries to analyze collected telemetry data efficiently, aiding in proactive troubleshooting.
  • Scalability
    Built to handle large-scale applications with high volumes of telemetry data, ensuring performance does not degrade as your application or infrastructure grows.
  • Alerting and Notification
    Provides robust alerting features, enabling users to set up alerts based on specific metrics or custom queries, so they can proactively manage issues.

Possible disadvantages of Azure Application Insights

  • Cost
    It can become expensive for large-scale applications due to the billing based on data volume and retention, which might not be cost-effective for smaller organizations or startups.
  • Complex Configuration
    Initial setup and configuration can be complex, requiring a fair amount of expertise to ensure that all application telemetry is effectively captured and interpreted.
  • Learning Curve
    Users may experience a steep learning curve, particularly if they are not familiar with Azure's ecosystem or the specific query languages needed for data analysis.
  • Data Latency
    Some users report a delay in data availability, which can impact the ability to perform real-time analysis and immediate troubleshooting.
  • Limited On-Premise Support
    Primarily designed for cloud-based applications, thus it may not support on-premise applications as effectively.

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

Azure Application Insights videos

Azure Application Insights Tutorial | Amazing telemetry service

More videos:

  • Review - Azure Application Insights

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Grafana and Azure Application Insights)
Monitoring Tools
97 97%
3% 3
Performance Monitoring
90 90%
10% 10
Data Dashboard
99 99%
1% 1
Log Management
95 95%
5% 5

User comments

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Reviews

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

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

Azure Application Insights Reviews

We have no reviews of Azure Application Insights yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Grafana seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 238 times since March 2021. 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 / 7 days 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 / 10 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 / 10 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 / 13 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 / 15 days ago
View more

Azure Application Insights mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Azure Application Insights yet. Tracking of Azure Application Insights recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Grafana and Azure Application Insights, you can also consider the following products

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

Sentry.io - From error tracking to performance monitoring, developers can see what actually matters, solve quicker, and learn continuously about their applications - from the frontend to the backend.

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

Graylog - Graylog is an open source log management platform for collecting, indexing, and analyzing both structured and unstructured data.

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.