1

I would like to know the difference between Grafana and PRTG from a functional point of view.

We use PRTG at work and I have to do a proof of concept on Grafana.

Every morning I look at the errors / warnings reported by PRTG but I lack overall visibility. So after some research I saw that PRTG offer to create MAPS (dashboards) but it seems limited to infra / network.

My objective is initially to make an easy correlation between the infrastructure's monitored elements (storage, vmware, switchs, etc...) and PRTG Maps seem to more or less meet the needs. Also I want to do daily/weekly reporting and easily follow the evolution of the infra over the month.

But on the other hand, I would like to be able to offer application dashboards and potentially dedicated to other teams (helpdesk, change manager, etc.)..

Grafana looks more friendly and especially seems to be able to create dashboards on other perimeters.

Can the two tools be complementary or PRTG is ok on its own ?

Thank you.

chriswh
  • 35
  • 1
  • 7

1 Answers1

0

PRTG allows you to create application dashboards - you are limited only by sensors you have in your system. This means if you create only system level sensors like Ping, CPU, network utilization - then you cannot really say much about your application since you monitor only infrastructure. PRTG is good in creating Maps in comparison to other monitoring tools and they are now working on improvement of this functionality (see their roadmap). Creating maps specific to teams in your company is possible with PRTG (permissions can be set) and is good idea in general.

To make weekly/daily reports there is possibility to let PRTG send you email with attached PDF related to sensor[s] you choose. Similar functionality has Grafana (cloud/enterprise version)

The difference between PRTG and Grafana as of January 2022 is that PRTG does not allow you to zoom into charts dynamically (meaning with your mouse at specific start/stop date/time range) - its much more "static" in this regard and you as user wish to have this option. If you create application map in PRTG then you can forget any zooming or changing of date on that dashboard - its just not built for it. Its more like "what is status now" dashboard, but never for analysis of issues which happened yesterday which is exactly what you want if something happened during weekend and its Monday.

I see that Grafana has some Machine Learning possibility where PRTG has none - it only shows you similar behavior of sensors but that is good for a cat (at least i never needed it in my 7+ years of using PRTG)

Grafana as far i know it is just a frontend but PRTG is whole monitoring system inclusive frontend so you are not comparing sensor capabilities here - in this PRTG is really very good and they are adding new sensors every month (meaning for new vendors/hardware you have possibility to monitor them with specialised sensors built just for this hardware)

I don't think you can combine Grafana and PRTG - its either or since you have different monitoring engine on background of Grafana.

Hope it answers your questions

jana
  • 166
  • 1
  • 3