SquaredUp vs Grafana: The Enterprise IT dashboard showdown

Modern enterprises operate across an increasingly complex mix of hybrid cloud services, and productivity platforms. As environments scale, stakeholders need a single pane of glass (SPoG) to understand what’s happening across IT operations without jumping across dozens of disconnected tools.

For enterprises invested heavily in the Microsoft ecosystem, this need is even more pronounced. Azure infrastructure, Azure DevOps pipelines, M365 usage, and on‑premises systems all generate critical operational data - but that data is deeply contextual, platform‑specific, and often interrelated. A true enterprise dashboard isn’t just about visualizing metrics; it’s about understanding Microsoft platforms as platforms, with their native concepts, relationships, and operational signals intact.

Both Grafana and SquaredUp can aggregate data from multiple sources. However, when it comes to Microsoft’s extensive enterprise stack, the two platforms differ significantly in how they integrate with these services. In this comparison, we look at why SquaredUp is the clear winner for enterprise dashboarding for your IT stack, especially if you’re a Microsoft-shop. Not convinced? Read on!

Microsoft integrations: SquaredUp vs Grafana at-a-glance

To quickly illustrate how each platform supports key Microsoft technologies, consider the following comparison:

Each integration above highlights a broader theme: Grafana treats Microsoft platforms primarily as data feeds (“just another source of metrics or logs”), whereas SquaredUp treats them as first-class platforms that deserve specialized, ready-to-use connectors and contextual dashboards.

Deeper dive: Key considerations for Microsoft-centric teams

Now let’s examine in more detail why these differences matter for an enterprise invested in Microsoft’s ecosystem:

✔ Azure observability

Both Grafana and SquaredUp connect to Azure Monitor for core telemetry – metrics, logs, and traces – but the depth of integration differs. Grafana’s Azure Monitor data source can display performance charts and even run KQL queries on Log Analytics data. However, Grafana’s approach is largely hands-on: each query must be manually crafted in KQL or selected per panel. In comparison, SquaredUp’s native Azure plugin was built with Azure administrators in mind. This means a team can get useful dashboards up and running faster, without needing every team member to be fluent in KQL or Azure’s API specifics.

Beyond the basics, SquaredUp’s Azure integration uniquely includes cost management and alert status out-of-the-box. For example, a cloud cost dashboard that might take significant JSON or API work to build in Grafana can be enabled in minutes with SquaredUp’s built-in Azure Cost tile. The result is a more complete picture of your Azure environment: performance and cost and real-time alerts, all visible together.

To learn more about the data visualization capabilities compared across SquaredUp and Grafana specifically in the context of Azure, check out this deep-dive Azure dashboard comparison.

✔ DevOps & developer tools:

Azure DevOps

Modern enterprises rely on CI/CD pipelines and DevOps metrics to keep software delivery on track. Grafana’s ADO integration is primarily focused on using ADO as a data source for metrics – for example, tracking build durations or failure rates. In essence, Grafana can show numbers from ADO, but it doesn’t inherently understand ADO as anything more than a database.

SquaredUp’s Azure DevOps plugin, on the other hand, treats ADO not just as a source of telemetry, but as a platform to be monitored in context. SquaredUp provides built-in data streams for common ADO metrics, so teams can quickly drop these onto a dashboard without writing code. Additionally, SquaredUp supports using WIQL to pull in work item statistics or project tracking data into dashboards, something Grafana would require custom development or plugins to achieve.

GitHub

Both platforms offer first-party support here – Grafana’s GitHub data source covers a wide array of GitHub data points, while SquaredUp’s GitHub plugin similarly provides broad insight into your repos, issues, PRs, and more. The key difference is quickly getting to those insights. Grafana’s plugin requires you to configure queries while SquaredUp offers a more streamlined experience with pre-built data streams for common needs (e.g. Open PRs or Repo list) onto a dashboard without detailing the query logic. The SquaredUp GitHub integration also emphasizes DevSecOps and reliability metrics by exposing GitHub security alerts (code scanning, secret scans, Dependabot) as ready-made dashboard elements.

For all stakeholders, this means better visibility in the software delivery process. You can have a unified dashboard of operational metrics and project delivery metrics side by side – all within one pane of glass. Grafana would need significant manual effort to create this kind of blended view, whereas SquaredUp makes it plug-and-play.

✔ Productivity & collaboration: M365 and SharePoint Files

If your workforce runs M365, the ability to track usage, adoption, and service health is critical. SquaredUp’s M365 plugin was designed for IT admins and service owners who need quick answers about email usage, Teams activity, or license allocation. With native support for Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Microsoft 365 licenses, and even new features like Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption stats, SquaredUp can pull in rich insights with just a few clicks. Out of the box, it offers dozens of pre-built data streams to help you monitor your M365 environment effectively.

However, collaboration isn’t just about knowing numbers – sometimes you want to bring actual content into your dashboards to give business context. This is another area where SquaredUp shines. Thanks to its SharePoint plugin, you can embed documents and files from SharePoint directly into your dashboards.

Grafana, by contrast, has no native M365 data source. Achieving similar insights would require either exporting data from M365 admin portals and importing it into a database or manually querying the Graph API for each endpoint. For a busy enterprise IT team, the built-in M365 integration in SquaredUp offers immediate value – you can identify underused licenses, monitor service outages, or demonstrate ROI on M365 investments in a single dashboard without custom development. There also isn’t an equivalent to dashboarding data from SharePoint files in Grafana.

✔ On-prem monitoring & hybrid cloud

Many large organizations have a mix of cloud services and on-premises infrastructure. Microsoft SCOM remains a staple for on-prem monitoring in Windows-centric IT environments. Here, too, SquaredUp shines. SquaredUp’s roots are in providing the #1 dashboard solution for SCOM – and in its cloud edition, a built-in SCOM plugin continues that legacy. SquaredUp can directly connect to SCOM to pull in all the objects, performance data, and health states that SCOM monitors. This means you can create unified dashboards that show both SCOM data alongside cloud data like Azure – no more jumping between separate tools.

Grafana does not include SCOM support by default. While third-party solutions exist to bridge SCOM to Grafana, they require extra installation and may not capture every nuance of SCOM’s model. For a Microsoft enterprise with critical on-prem infrastructure, having SCOM integrated out-of-the-box in SquaredUp means less time spent on custom integration and more time acting on insights.

✔ Scripting & flexibility with PowerShell

Another area where SquaredUp provides unique value to Microsoft-centric IT teams is its PowerShell integration. PowerShell is the language of Windows and Azure automation, used for everything from Active Directory management to custom monitoring scripts. SquaredUp includes a PowerShell data source plugin that lets you execute scripts on the fly and feed the results into dashboards. This is extremely powerful: if a native plugin doesn’t exist for a Microsoft product or some internal system, you can often use PowerShell or the REST WebAPI plugin to connect and visualize the data with minimal effort.

Grafana, being more oriented to static data sources, has no comparable built-in feature to run custom scripts and get data directly. Advanced users might set up external jobs that push data into Grafana via a database or use the JSON API plugin, but that’s a far cry from simply putting a PowerShell script in a dashboard tile as you can with SquaredUp. For a Microsoft shop, this flexibility means no data is off-limits – if you have a script for it, you can dashboard it.

✔ Licensing costs for Enterprise scale

A final crucial consideration for enterprise value is how easily you can share insights across the organization. Grafana and SquaredUp both support sharing dashboards, but their licensing models differ significantly. Grafana’s commercial offerings (e.g. Grafana Cloud or Enterprise) typically count every viewer as a licensed user, meaning that even read-only access for a wide audience can increase costs.

SquaredUp’s licensing, on the other hand, is designed for broad sharing. Any number of view-only users can access shared dashboards without consuming additional licenses. This is a significant advantage when you need to broadcast information widely in a large organization. This capability makes it feasible to turn IT insights into organization-wide knowledge, driving better decisions at all levels.

✔ Application health roll-ups

Grafana focuses on individual metrics and visualizations. It lacks a native health roll-up or application model to aggregate multiple parts of an app (represented as dashboards) into a hierarchy. Users must infer overall health by manually correlating charts.

This is one of SquaredUp’s most powerful capabilities. SquaredUp can roll up multiple dashboards into a unified health status for an application or service. These roll-ups let you build hierarchical, end-to-end views for rapid root-cause analysis. This is extremely helpful to build a visual hierarchy of your apps, and to follow the layers of application monitoritoring end-to-end across multiple tools and services.

Conclusion: SquaredUp is the clear choice for Microsoft-centric enterprises

Both Grafana and SquaredUp are powerful dashboarding platforms, but for a Microsoft-centric enterprise, SquaredUp delivers a more comprehensive and frictionless solution. It natively covers the Microsoft ecosystem end-to-end – from Azure infrastructure to Microsoft 365 – often with ready-to-use integrations that surface key metrics and context immediately. Grafana can be made to work with many Microsoft services, but doing so frequently involves extra plugins, custom queries, or workarounds that require time and expertise.

For an executive or IT leader overseeing a Microsoft-heavy environment, the differences are clear and for organizations firmly in the Microsoft camp, SquaredUp is the better choice to achieve a unified, high-value view of your enterprise.