skywalking VS Grafana

Compare skywalking vs Grafana and see what are their differences.

Grafana

The open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more. (by grafana)
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skywalking Grafana
22 376
23,131 59,887
0.7% 1.5%
9.5 10.0
3 days ago 5 days ago
Java TypeScript
Apache License 2.0 GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

skywalking

Posts with mentions or reviews of skywalking. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-19.
  • Enhancing API Observability Series (Part 3): Tracing
    3 projects | dev.to | 19 Mar 2024
    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.
  • Five Apache projects you probably didn't know about
    8 projects | dev.to | 21 Dec 2023
    Apache SkyWalking is an APM tool, focusing on microservices, Cloud Native apps, and Kuernetes architectures. It builds its architecture on four kinds of components:
  • Show HN: Monitor your webapp with minimal setup
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Nov 2023
  • It's time to let go, Apache Software Foundation
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Sep 2023
    Trying to play devil's advocate here.

    > It needs at least a stable set of users, but maintaining a set of users is essentially managing the set of people onboarding and the set of people migrating off.

    I could say that I don't care very much about how much users a piece of software has, only that it has enough information on how to use it and enough maintainers to patch any security vulnerabilities and do occasional releases with updated dependencies, as well as address any serious issues or bugs.

    For example, Apache Skywalking is an APM solution that most people haven't even heard of (in contrast to something like Sentry), yet it fits those qualities and I see few to no issues with it: https://skywalking.apache.org/

    > If you're shrinking then a competitor is providing better options, or your problem space has shifted.

    Again, as a user, I might not care that Sentry or another piece of software is better in any number of ways than Apache Skywalking. Similarly, I might not care that something like PostgreSQL is more correct or has a large market share (at least on HN) in comparison to something like MariaDB/MySQL.

    If a piece of software meets the needs of my project and won't effectively rot with time, then it's quite possibly good enough as it is, even if it's not the market leader. For my small project's APM needs Apache Skywalking is enough. For my CRUD database needs, something like MariaDB/MySQL will be okay until the time Sun burns out (or PostgreSQL if I'm feeling fancy, but even that's not one of the modern and hip solutions).

    Ergo, those better options only become relevant once they're closer to being must haves than nice to haves. Same as how Docker Swarm might be enough for many, even if Kubernetes basically won in the "container wars" and has a way more active community. Swarm will only stop being an option for me once it hits EOL, at least for certain projects where simplicity is appreciated.

    Then again, a counterpoint to my own argument here could be the story of LibreOffice and OpenOffice, where the latter was basically donated (instead of the rights to the name being given to the folks behind LibreOffice) and is now in decline while LibreOffice is flourishing - but at the same time they were so close to one another feature wise, that maybe it's not a good point, same as with Gogs and Gitea.

  • JDK 21 Release Notes
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Sep 2023
    > Where's Java primarily used these days?

    I've seen a lot of enterprise-y webdev projects use it for back end stuff (Dropwizard, Spring Boot, Vert.X, Quarkus) and in rare cases even front end (like Vaadin or JSF/PrimeFaces). The IDEs are pretty great, especially the ones by JetBrains, the tooling is pretty mature and boring, the performance is really good (memory usage aside) and the language itself is... okay.

    Curiously, I wanted to run my own server for OIDC/OAuth2 authn/authz and to have common features like registration, password resets and social login available to me out of the box, for which I chose Keycloak: https://www.keycloak.org/

    Surprise surprise, it's running Java under the hood. I wanted to integrate some of my services with their admin API, seems like the Java library is also updated pretty frequently: https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.keycloak/keycloak-adm... whereas ones I found for .NET feel like they're stagnating more: https://www.nuget.org/packages?q=keycloak (probably not a dealbreaker, though)

    Then, I wanted to run an APM stack with Apache Skywalking (simpler to self-host than Sentry), which also turns out to be a Java app under the hood: https://skywalking.apache.org/

    Also you occasionally see like bank auth libraries or e-signing libraries be offered in Java as well first and foremost, at least in my country (maybe PHP sometimes): https://www.eparaksts.lv/en/for_developers/Java_libraries and their app for getting certificates from the government issued eID cards also runs off of Java.

    So while Java isn't exactly "hot" tech, it's used all over the place: even in some game engines, like jMonkeyEngine, or in infrastructure code where something like Go might actually be more comfortable to use.

  • OpenTelemetry in 2023
    36 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Aug 2023
    > What should people use?

    I recall Apache Skywalking being pretty good, especially for smaller/medium scale projects: https://skywalking.apache.org/

    The architecture is simple, the performance is adequate, it doesn't make you spend days configuring it and it even supports various different data stores: https://skywalking.apache.org/docs/main/v9.0.0/en/setup/back...

    The problems with it are that it isn't super popular (although has agents for most popular stacks), the docs could be slightly better and I recall them also working on a new UI so there is a little bit of churn: https://skywalking.apache.org/downloads/

    Still better versus some of the other options when you need something that just works instead of spending a lot of time configuring something (even when that something might be superior in regards to the features): https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...

    Sentry is just the first thing that comes to mind (OpenTelemetry also isn't simpler due to how much it tries to do), but compare its complexity to Skywalking: https://github.com/apache/skywalking/blob/master/docker/dock...

    I wish there was more self-hosted software like that out there, enough to address certain concerns in a simple way on day 1 and leave branching out to more complex options like OpenTelemetry once you have a separate team for that and the cash is rolling in.

  • Improving Observability of Go Services
    2 projects | /r/golang | 3 Feb 2023
  • Monitoring Microservices with Prometheus and Grafana
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Dec 2022
    Personally I've also used Apache Skywalking for a decent out of the box experience: https://skywalking.apache.org/

    I've also heard good things about Sentry, though if you need to self-host it, then there's a bit of complexity to deal with: https://sentry.io/welcome/

  • How to choose the right API Gateway
    15 projects | dev.to | 22 Nov 2022
    Next characteristic of a good API Gateway is effortless integration with more ecosystems. You need to check if it is integrated with other products, tools, platforms, and services. For example, you can investigate if supports several application protocols, and compatibility with third-party identity providers for authentication, and if it provides pre-built connectors that you can easily integrate with Most observability platforms like (Prometheus, Skywalking, ElasticSearch, Opentelemetry, and so on).
  • The Modern Observability Problem
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Nov 2022
    For me, Apache Skywalking feels "good enough", although definitely not perfect: https://skywalking.apache.org/

    The Docker Compose stack for it doesn't look as complicated as that of Sentry, it's basically an almost monolithic piece of software like Zabbix is and it works okay. The UI is reasonably sane to navigate and you have agents that you can connect with most popular languages out there.

    That said, the UI sometimes feels a bit janky, the documentation isn't exactly ideal and the community could definitely be bigger (niche language support). Also, ElasticSearch as the data store feels too resource intensive, I wonder if I could move to MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL for smaller amounts of data.

    Then again, if I could make monitoring and observability someone else's problem, I'd prosper more, so it depends on your circumstances.

Grafana

Posts with mentions or reviews of Grafana. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-02.
  • 4 facets of API monitoring you should implement
    3 projects | dev.to | 2 Mar 2024
    Prometheus: Open-source monitoring system. Often used together with Grafana.
  • The Mechanics of Silicon Valley Pump and Dump Schemes
    8 projects | dev.to | 18 Feb 2024
    Grafana
  • Reverse engineering the Grafana API to get the data from a dashboard
    2 projects | dev.to | 17 Feb 2024
    Yes I'm aware that Grafana is open source but the method I used to find the API endpoints is far quicker than digging through hundreds of files in a codebase I'm not familiar with.
  • Building an Observability Stack with Docker
    5 projects | dev.to | 15 Feb 2024
    So, you will add one last container to allow us to visualize this data: Grafana, an open-source analytics and visualization platform that allows us to see traces and metrics simply. You can set Grafana to read data from both Tempo and Prometheus by setting them as datastores with the following grafana.datasource.yaml config file:
  • How to collect metrics from node.js applications in PM2 with exporting to Prometheus
    3 projects | dev.to | 13 Feb 2024
    In example above, we use 2 additional parameters: code (HTTP response code) and page (page identifier), which provide detailed statistics. For example, you can build such graphs in Grafana:
  • Root Cause Chronicles: Quivering Queue
    5 projects | dev.to | 16 Jan 2024
    Robin switched to the Grafana dashboard tab, and sure enough, the 5xx volume on web service was rising. It had not hit the critical alert thresholds yet, but customers had already started noticing.
  • Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    I completely agree but do feel it needs qualifying. The problems beginners run into aren't usually the same as the problems experienced devs run into when adopting a language new to them, but where I see the two overlap I know something is a serious hazard in a language.

    Java as a first language: won't like the boilerplate but won't have any point of comparison anyway, will get a few NPEs, might use threads and get data races but won't experience memory unsafety.

    Go as a first language: much less boilerplate, but will still get nil panics, will be encouraged to use goroutines because every tutorial shows off how "easy" they are, will get data races with full blown memory unsafety immediately.

    Rust as a first language: `None` // no examples found

    I think Go as a beginner language would be better if people were discouraged from using goroutines instead of actively encouraged (the myth of "CSP solves everything"), otherwise I think it needs much better tooling to save people from walking off a cliff with their goroutines. And no, -race clearly isn't it, especially not for a beginner.

    And in one respect I've found Go more of a hazard for experienced devs than beginners: the function signature of append() gives you the intuition of a functional programming append that never modifies the original slice. This has literally resulted in CVEs[1] even by experienced devs, especially combined with goroutines. Beginners won't have an intuition for this and will hopefully check the documentation instead of assuming.

    [1] https://github.com/grafana/grafana/security/advisories/GHSA-...

  • Start your server remotely
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 11 Dec 2023
    I build the Tasmota firmware for the S31's nightly, and expose the Prometheus endpoint so I can also monitor the current used by these devices in real time with the data pushed to Grafana. I have ~30 of them in my home/homelab, and servers, appliances, sump pump, fans, etc. are all monitored by my S31 fleet.
  • List of your reverse proxied services
    29 projects | /r/selfhosted | 5 Dec 2023
    Grafana - for dashboards and log monitoring
  • PM2 module to monitoring node.js application with export to Prometheus and Grafana
    2 projects | dev.to | 29 Nov 2023
    In most cases, applications use the combination of Prometheus + Grafana, which allows collect data and display it in the form of graphs and also to set up alerts for changes in any metrics.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing skywalking and Grafana you can also consider the following projects:

Thingsboard - Open-source IoT Platform - Device management, data collection, processing and visualization.

prometheus - The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

Apache Superset - Apache Superset is a Data Visualization and Data Exploration Platform [Moved to: https://github.com/apache/superset]

Heimdall - An Application dashboard and launcher

jaeger - CNCF Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing Platform

Wazuh - Wazuh - The Open Source Security Platform. Unified XDR and SIEM protection for endpoints and cloud workloads.

Thingspeak - ThingSpeak is an open source “Internet of Things” application and API to store and retrieve data from things using HTTP over the Internet or via a Local Area Network. With ThingSpeak, you can create sensor logging applications, location tracking applications, and a social network of things with status updates.

signoz - SigNoz is an open-source observability platform native to OpenTelemetry with logs, traces and metrics in a single application. An open-source alternative to DataDog, NewRelic, etc. 🔥 🖥. 👉 Open source Application Performance Monitoring (APM) & Observability tool

uptime-kuma - A fancy self-hosted monitoring tool

Pinpoint - APM, (Application Performance Management) tool for large-scale distributed systems.

zipkin - Zipkin is a distributed tracing system

Freeboard - A damn-sexy, open source real-time dashboard builder for IOT and other web mashups. A free open-source alternative to Geckoboard.