Grafana Cloud

Pros: - Excellent support.
- Love all the documentation that exists. makes it so much better than closed source products that we migrated away from.
- We've had the best experience with both the people that got us stood up and the continued support. Our account manager is a complete rockstar. Chris Harbro is probably the most technical account manager I've dealt with and his tenacity for finding solutions to our issues is impressive. Our onboarding sales engineer Ian Bloom was like that as well.
- AI features. This is what hooked us. AI is changing so quickly so who knows what this'll look like when someone reads this: I started using grafana MCP with grafana at first so when I started using the AI assistant in the cloud it was amazing, MCP alone is great but there's still a disconnect between the operator and the harness on what each other is looking at. with the AI assistant if works more more symbiotically. I will admit that now with claude chrome extension though it's pretty close.

Cons: - Not the easiest to set up. quite a bit more work than some of other systems we've tried.

Overall: I'm very happy we moved over to Grafana Cloud. we get better insight into our systems as a whole since there is just so much integrations. This centralization makes analysis better and easier for us with AI assistance.

Pros: Grafana is a trusted tool for a reason, and as such I've used it every company I have worked for. The tool makes creating new dashboards a breeze. And with their new AI tool, you can update and create dashboards with confidence. When our network dashboard broke due to a plugin deprecating, the AI tool was able to recommend a new plugin, build the dashboard, and configure it based on SNMP logs it read from our central log store. It even recommended things to configure alerts on and added more metrics for us to track.

Cons: Due to the ease of use creating new dashboards, you have to be very disciplined to check for other dashboards before you just make the same one again. The number of times I've made a dashboard only to find out that somebody made the same one a few months ago but with a different name.

Overall: Grafana is a great tool that we utilize everyday. Technical dashboards and C-Level dashboards can be right next to each other and look great. Data can be made to actually be pretty and not just text on a page.