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Millwright vs Grafana
Grafana draws the dashboard. It carries no model of the plant. The asset behind the series, who may see one unit, and the work order behind the spike all live somewhere else. Millwright is the workspace teams usually assemble out of Grafana, with trend, asset, ticket, and procedure on the same point.
- Keep Grafana when
- A platform team owns the boards, and the data is software metrics.
- Pick Millwright when
- Operators, contractors, or customers need the trend, the ticket, and the procedure on one asset.
What you get
- Millwright
- Trend, asset, ticket, and procedure on one point.
- Grafana
- Panels and alert rules you assemble from queries.
Who builds it
- Millwright
- Nobody. Read-only historian access and tag review; weeks for one system.
- Grafana
- A platform engineer, for as long as the boards live.
Access control
- Millwright
- Roles from your identity provider, down the asset hierarchy to a unit, a system, or a point.
- Grafana
- Viewer, Editor, Admin, plus folder permissions. Enterprise adds RBAC on Grafana objects (folders, dashboards, data sources), not on a unit of the plant.
Sharing a view
- Millwright
- Scope is the asset: a contractor sees one unit, a customer sees their site.
- Grafana
- A dashboard in an iframe. You still run Grafana and map its auth, and the open-source build is AGPL.
Work and procedures
- Millwright
- Docket and Book sit on the same asset as the trend.
- Grafana
- Elsewhere. The work order is wherever you paste the screenshot.
Alarms
- Millwright
- Groups the alarms the plant already raised. Does not write to the DCS.
- Grafana
- Alert rules on queries you wrote. You own the noise.
Grafana as described on their public pages in October 2026. Corrections.
Where Grafana wins
- A platform team will own the boards, and wants to.
- The series are software metrics with no plant model to maintain.
- The deliverable is a dashboard.
Where Millwright wins
- Operators, contractors, or customers need scoped views of the plant.
- Access has to follow the asset hierarchy, not the folder tree.
- The ticket and the procedure belong on the trend.
How they fit together
Keep Grafana for software metrics and anything a platform team already maintains. Buy Millwright when the dashboard is standing in for an operations workspace: the trend with the ticket behind it, the procedure on the asset, and access by plant instead of by folder tree. A general-purpose toolkit arrives as a project to staff.
Questions
Can we keep Grafana for software and use Millwright for the plant?
Yes. That is the ordinary split. Grafana stays the board for services and infrastructure. Millwright sits on the historian and the work, which Grafana was never going to model without a project.
Does Grafana Enterprise close the access gap?
Inside Grafana it does: folders, data sources, audit logs. It still does not scope a contractor to one compressor, or put the procedure on the trend.
What do we stop maintaining?
Folder permissions, auth mapping, and the gap between the panel and the ticket. If the embed serves engineers who want a dashboard, leave it alone.
See it running on your own plant.
We are onboarding a small number of operations teams. Three questions, and we will be in touch.