| Product | Grafana |
| Website | grafana.com |
| Category | Observability / Monitoring |
| Pricing | OSS (free), Grafana Cloud from free tier, Enterprise custom |
What Is Grafana?
Grafana is an open-source observability platform for visualizing metrics, logs, and traces. Connect Grafana to your data sources — Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and 100+ more — and build dashboards that show the health and performance of your systems.
Grafana is the visualization layer in the modern observability stack. Prometheus collects metrics, Loki collects logs, Tempo collects traces, and Grafana visualizes all of them in a single pane of glass. The dashboards are real-time, interactive, and shareable.
Key Features
100+ Data Source Plugins
Connect to Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and 100+ other data sources. A single dashboard can query multiple data sources, combining metrics from Prometheus with logs from Loki and traces from Tempo.
Dashboard Builder
Build dashboards with drag-and-drop panels: time series graphs, gauges, bar charts, tables, heatmaps, logs, and more. Panels are interactive: click on a spike to drill down, filter by label, and correlate metrics with logs.
Alerting
Define alert rules on any metric or log query. Grafana evaluates rules continuously and sends notifications through email, Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or 30+ contact points. Silencing, grouping, and routing control alert noise.
Grafana Cloud
Managed Prometheus (Mimir), Loki, Tempo, and Grafana. No infrastructure to manage. The free tier includes 10K metrics, 50GB logs, and 50GB traces. Grafana Cloud is how most teams start: no setup, instant dashboards.
Who Is This For?
- DevOps and SRE teams monitoring production systems
- Anyone using Prometheus (Grafana is the standard frontend)
- Teams that need metrics, logs, and traces in one platform
- Organizations that want open-source observability
Pros
- Open source with huge community
- 100+ data source plugins
- Beautiful, interactive dashboards
- Unified metrics, logs, and traces
- Grafana Cloud with generous free tier
- Alerting with 30+ notification channels
Cons
- Dashboard management at scale can be messy
- PromQL has a steep learning curve
- Self-hosting the full stack is complex
- Performance degrades with too many panels
- Enterprise features require paid license
Verdict
Grafana is the standard for infrastructure observability. The combination of open source, 100+ data source plugins, and beautiful dashboard design makes it the default choice for DevOps and SRE teams. If you’re using Prometheus (and you should be), Grafana is the frontend.
The LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) is a complete open-source alternative to Datadog and New Relic. It’s more work to set up, but it’s cheaper at scale and you own your data. Grafana Cloud removes the operational burden while keeping the cost advantage.
Build an observability or monitoring tool?
Get reviewed and linked from our 27-site network.
See Packages