Compare Grafana vs. Kiali

Grafana Labs provides an open and composable observability stack built around Grafana, the leading open source technology for dashboards and visualization. Recognized as a 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Leader for Observability Platforms and positioned furthest to the right for Completeness of Vision, Grafana Labs supports over 25M users and 5,000+ customers. Grafana Cloud delivers the full power of Grafana’s open and composable observability stack—without the overhead of managing infrastructure. As a fully managed SaaS offering from Grafana Labs, it unifies metrics, logs, and traces in one place, giving engineering teams real-time visibility into systems and applications. Built around the LGTM Stack—Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics—Grafana Cloud provides a scalable foundation for modern observability. With built-in integrations for Kubernetes, cloud services, CI/CD pipelines, and OpenTelemetry, Grafana Cloud accelerates time to value while reducing operational complexity. Grafana Cloud also supports OLAP-style analytics through integrations with data warehouses and analytical engines like BigQuery, ClickHouse, and Druid—enabling multi-dimensional exploration across observability and business data. Teams gain access to powerful features like Adaptive Metrics for cost optimization, incident response workflows, and synthetic monitoring for performance testing—all within a secure, globally distributed platform. Whether you’re modernizing infrastructure, scaling observability, or driving SLO-based performance, Grafana Cloud delivers the insights you need—fast, flexible, and vendor-neutral.

Kiali serves as a comprehensive management console for the Istio service mesh, and it can be easily integrated as an add-on within Istio or trusted for use in a production setup. With the help of Kiali's wizards, users can effortlessly generate configurations for application and request routing. The platform allows users to perform actions such as creating, updating, and deleting Istio configurations, all facilitated by intuitive wizards. Kiali also boasts a rich array of service actions, complete with corresponding wizards to guide users. It offers both a concise list and detailed views of the components within your mesh. Moreover, Kiali presents filtered list views of all service mesh definitions, ensuring clarity and organization. Each view includes health metrics, detailed descriptions, YAML definitions, and links designed to enhance visualization of your mesh. The overview tab is the primary interface for any detail page, delivering in-depth insights, including health status and a mini-graph that illustrates current traffic related to the component. The complete set of tabs and the information available vary depending on the specific type of component, ensuring that users have access to relevant details. By utilizing Kiali, users can streamline their service mesh management and gain more control over their operational environment.