How Marple Complements Your Grafana Setup

Grafana, Marple, data & engineers.

Grafana has long been one of the go-to for engineers and developers seeking open-source observability. Its flexibility, extensibility, and vibrant plugin ecosystem have made it a staple in many tech stacks. However, as teams scale and the need for clarity and speed intensifies, Grafana's strengths can sometimes become limitations.

Where Grafana Shines

Grafana excels in:

• Database Integration: It connects with a multitude of data sources, making it a versatile tool for diverse environments.
• Custom Dashboards: Its ability to create tailored dashboards allows teams to visualize metrics in a way that suits their specific needs.
• Community Support: Being open-source, it benefits from a community that contributes plugins and shares knowledge.

Where engineers might struggle with Grafana

Despite its strengths, users have voiced concerns:

• Complex Configuration: Initial setup can be daunting, with a steep learning curve for dashboard creation, especially when JSON knowledge is required.
• Performance Issues: Rendering large/high-frequency datasets can lead to slow performance.
• Adding different files: In a perfect world, all data sources are in a single location. However, as is often the case with R&D and testing, files come in different file formats.
• Engineering specific tooling: Grafana is widely used to monitor systems. When it comes to analysis of R&D/testing data - things like additional math channels, data overlays, FFT analysis - it can often require a lot of extra work, or be out-right impossible.

Enter Marple

Marple addresses these challenges head-on:

• Intuitive for Engineers: Marple Insight is designed with the engineering use case in mind, allowing deep analysis without the need for extensive coding/IT knowledge.
• Multiple sources: With MarpleDB coupled to your infrastructure, you can handle file ingestion, processing and storage
• Optimized Performance: Engineered for time-series engineering data, Marple handles large datasets smoothly, ensuring excellent performance at even peak loads.
• For engineers by engineers: different plot types and aggregations, calculated signals, data overlays, ….

When to Make the Switch

Consider adding Marple to your workflow if:

• You're seeking to make data analysis workflows more intuitive for engineers.
• Performance with large datasets is a critical factor both for historical and realtime data.
• You want a flexible, drag and drop, visualisation solution

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