Grafana Only Shows You
Half the Story
Grafana is a great general-purpose monitoring tool. But it was never built for robots. When your AMR stops in the middle of a warehouse, Grafana shows you a metric. Insaion shows you the answer.
The observability chasm
Traditional monitoring tools cover MELT data (metrics, events, logs, traces). Robots produce something entirely different.
MELT data
- CPU / Memory / Network
- Application logs
- HTTP traces
- Generic time-series metrics
Multimodal robot data
- ROS2 topics & message types
- Sensor streams (LiDAR, camera, IMU)
- MCAP recordings
- Robot state, velocity, motor temp
Where Grafana hits its limits
Three fundamental gaps that Grafana can't solve, no matter how many plugins you add.
Can't monitor ROS2 topics
Grafana was built for MELT data (metrics, events, logs, traces). It has no native understanding of ROS2 topics, message types, or robot-specific data structures.
No concept of a bag file
When something goes wrong, you need the full multimodal recording — MCAP, ROS bags, sensor data. Grafana has no mechanism to capture, store, or link to these files.
Can't trigger a recording
Grafana can alert you that a threshold was breached. But it can't trigger an on-robot edge recording to capture the exact moment the anomaly occurred.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Grafana | Insaion |
|---|---|---|
| ROS2 topic monitoring | ||
| Custom metric dashboards | ||
| Smart alerting | ||
| AI diagnostic chat | ||
| MCAP recordings | ||
| Triggered edge recordings | ||
| Device metadata management | ||
| Fleet monitoring templates | ||
| Multimodal data correlation | ||
| Open source | ||
| Self-hosted option |
Visualization tools: Best in class
These tools are unmatched for post-hoc visualization and analysis. Use them. But they leave a critical gap that INSAION fills.
Unmatched for visualization and deep post-hoc analysis of bag files. Excellent at showing you what happened once you have the file.
They don't monitor your fleet, they don't fire alerts, and they don't have an intelligent data pipeline to get the data. You still have to manually find and feed the right bag file.
The solution: One-click root cause
INSAION connects your monitoring alerts directly to your bag file analysis. Monitor Record Alarm Analyze, all in one platform.
Monitor
The lightweight INSAION agent runs on your robot, watching everything
Record
The same agent is already recording high-fidelity data on the robot.
Alarm & Grasp
You set powerful alarms in INSAION. When an alarm triggers, it automatically 'grasps' a slice from that exact moment.
View & Analyze
Visualize and analyze the correlated MELT and multimodal robot data in INSAION's built-in viewer or export to your favorite tools.
Monitor
The lightweight INSAION agent runs on your robot, watching everything
Record
The same agent is already recording high-fidelity data on the robot.
Alarm & Grasp
You set powerful alarms in INSAION. When an alarm triggers, it automatically 'grasps' a slice from that exact moment.
View & Analyze
Visualize and analyze the correlated MELT and multimodal robot data in INSAION's built-in viewer or export to your favorite tools.
Already using Grafana?
Insaion doesn't replace your existing Grafana dashboards. Many teams run both, Grafana for infrastructure observability, Insaion for robot-specific monitoring and diagnostics. We complement each other.
Don't Use an IT Tool for a
Robotics Job
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