Cisco's acquisition of Splunk today(21, Sept) will probably not be the end for Splunk but a new beginning as more and more of the things become represented with digits and colours we(engineers) use daily to keep us awake of what's happening under the hood.
Monitoring is not only telling you about the overall system health it is maybe the only way to know if you are doing the right thing.
In this post, I will try to simplify the different monitoring tools with best practices and their advantages over each other.
Grafana
Grafana is likely the most feature-rich and most customisable tool available. Endless data sources to connect and types of visualisations to create your dashboards, save different versions, export as JSON file to pass other teams/use it elsewhere.
%[ https://youtu.be/K29Q8EaKN8U ]
Datadog
Great if you have lots of logs, but for visualisation it may not be cheap. The better option is to sync Grafana with Datadog.
Splunk
I think the winner of both categories. I think it offers nice features and less complicated dashboards if you want to launch your infrastructure logging and monitoring efficiently.