Alternatives to the Grafana stack
The monitoring and observability space is packed with different open and closed source solutions such as ps and top going back to the 70s and 80s. We will not attempt to list every tool here; we aim to offer a source of inspiration for people who are curious and want to explore, or who need a quick reference of the available tools (as the authors have on a few occasions).
Data collection
These are agent tools that can be used to collect telemetry from the source:
|
Tool Name |
Telemetry Types |
|
OpenTelemetry Collector |
Metrics, logs, traces |
|
FluentBit |
Metrics, logs, traces |
|
Vector |
Metrics, logs, traces |
|
Vendor-specific agents (See the Data storage, processing, and visualization section for an expanded list) |
Metrics, logs, traces |
|
Beats family |
Metrics, logs |
|
Prometheus |
Metrics |
|
Telegraf |
Metrics |
|
StatsD |
Metrics |
|
Collectd |
Metrics |
|
Carbon |
Metrics |
|
Syslog-ng |
Logs |
|
Rsyslog |
Logs |
|
Fluentd |
Logs |
|
Flume |
Logs |
|
Zipkin Collector |
Traces |
Table 1.2 – Data collection tools
Data collection is only one piece of the extract transform and load process for observability data. The next section introduces tools to transform and load data.
Data storage, processing, and visualization
We’ve grouped data processing, storage, and visualization together, as there are often a lot of crossovers among them. There are certain tools that also provide security monitoring and are closely related. However, as this topic is outside of the scope of this book, we have chosen to exclude tools that are solely in the security space.
|
Tool Name |
Tool Name |
Tool Name |
|
AppDynamics |
InfluxDB |
Sematext |
|
Aspecto |
Instana |
Sensu |
|
AWS CloudWatch & CloudTrail |
Jaeger |
Sentry |
|
Azure Application insights |
Kibana |
Serverless360 |
|
Centreon |
Lightstep |
SigNoz |
|
ClickHouse |
Loggly |
SkyWalking |
|
Coralogix |
LogicMonitor |
Solarwinds |
|
Cortex |
Logtail |
Sonic |
|
Cyclotron |
Logz.io |
Splunk |
|
Datadog |
Mezmo |
Sumo Logic |
|
Dynatrace |
Nagios |
TelemetryHub |
|
Elastic |
NetData |
Teletrace |
|
GCP Cloud Operations Suite |
New Relic |
Thanos |
|
Grafana Labs |
OpenSearch |
Uptrace |
|
Graphite |
OpenTSDB |
VictoriaMetrics |
|
Graylog |
Prometheus |
Zabbix |
|
Honeycomb |
Scalyr |
Zipkin |
Table 1.3 – Data storage processing and visualization tools
With a good understanding of the tools available in this space, let’s now look at the ways we can deploy the tools offered by Grafana.
