Grafana shows you
half the story
Grafana shows you a metric. Insaion shows you why your robot stopped.
Robots aren't servers
IT tools watch metrics, logs and traces. Robots produce much more.
What IT tools see
- CPU, memory, network
- Application logs
- HTTP traces
- Generic time series
What robots produce
- ROS 2 topics and message types
- LiDAR, camera, IMU streams
- MCAP recordings
- State, velocity, motor temperature
Where Grafana stops
Three gaps no plugin closes.
01
Blind to ROS 2.
No idea what a topic or a message type is.
02
No recordings.
Nothing to capture, store or replay MCAP.
03
Stops at the alert.
It tells you a threshold broke. It can't get the data off the robot.
Side by side
| Feature | Grafana | Insaion |
|---|---|---|
| ROS2 topic monitoring | ||
| Custom metric dashboards | ||
| Smart alerting | ||
| AI diagnostic chat | ||
| MCAP recordings | ||
| On-demand edge recordings | ||
| Device metadata management | ||
| Fleet monitoring templates | ||
| Multimodal data correlation | ||
| Open source | ||
| Self-hosted option |
Foxglove, Rerun, PlotJuggler start after the failure
Great for analyzing a file. Insaion makes sure the file exists.
Insaion
- Watches the fleet
- Fires the alarm
- Keeps the recording
Foxglove · Rerun · PlotJuggler
- Open the MCAP
- Analyze it in depth
Every Insaion recording is standard MCAP. Open it in the built-in viewer or the tool you already use.
From alarm to root cause
One agent. One platform. Four steps.
Monitor
The agent finds your ROS 2 topics. Live dashboards in minutes.
Record
A rolling MCAP buffer on every robot, online or offline.
Alarm
Rules on any metric. Your team hears about it first.
Replay
Pull the minutes around the alarm. Replay them in the browser or your own tools.
Common comparison questions
Is Insaion a Foxglove alternative?
Insaion overlaps with Foxglove on visualization but solves a different problem. Foxglove visualizes a recording once you have it; Insaion monitors the fleet, alarms on anomalies and keeps a rolling MCAP buffer on each robot so the recording exists. Many teams use both, and Insaion recordings open in Foxglove as standard MCAP.
Can I use Insaion with PlotJuggler or Rerun?
Yes. Insaion stores recordings as standard MCAP files that can be downloaded and opened in PlotJuggler, Rerun, Foxglove or any MCAP-compatible tool, alongside the built-in Lichtblick viewer.
Can Grafana monitor ROS 2 topics?
Not natively. Grafana visualizes metrics, logs and traces from data sources it supports, but it has no understanding of ROS 2 topics, message types or MCAP recordings. Insaion's agent discovers ROS 2 topics directly on the robot.
Already on Grafana or Foxglove? Keep them.
Grafana for infrastructure. Your viewer for MCAP. Insaion for the robots.
Don't use an IT tool for a
robotics job
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