Grafana
FreemiumThe open and composable observability and data visualization platform.
Scores
About
Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform developed by Grafana Labs, widely adopted for infrastructure monitoring, application observability, and business dashboards. At its core, Grafana provides a flexible panel-based dashboard system that can query data from virtually any source — Prometheus, InfluxDB, Loki, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and 150+ others — without moving data. Dashboards are composed of panels: time-series graphs, heatmaps, stat widgets, tables, geomap, histograms, and more. Grafana 12 (May 2025) introduced "observability as code" with Git Sync, dynamic dashboards, and enhanced alerting. Grafana Cloud provides a managed version with a generous free tier and usage-based pricing for growing teams. The full LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) positions Grafana Labs as a complete observability platform. With 67.5k GitHub stars and AGPLv3 license, Grafana is the de facto standard for infrastructure and application dashboards.
Key Features
- 150+ built-in data source plugins (Prometheus, InfluxDB, Loki, PostgreSQL, CloudWatch, etc.)
- Rich panel library: time-series, heatmap, geomap, stat, table, histogram, candlestick
- Unified alerting with multi-channel notifications (Slack, PagerDuty, email, webhooks)
- Grafana 12 Git Sync — manage dashboards as code in GitHub
- Grafana Cloud LGTM stack: Loki (logs), Grafana, Tempo (traces), Mimir (metrics)
- Transformations for in-dashboard data manipulation without querying
- Template variables for dynamic, reusable dashboards
- Embedded Grafana panels via iframe or native embedding API
Pros
- Connects to virtually any data source — unmatched breadth of integrations
- Best-in-class time-series visualization for metrics and observability
- Generous Grafana Cloud free tier (10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces)
- AGPLv3 open-source — fully self-hostable
- Git Sync (v12) enables infrastructure-as-code dashboard management
- 67k+ GitHub stars, massive community, and extensive plugin marketplace
Cons
- Not optimized for ad-hoc business analysis — more ops/engineering-focused
- Dashboard configuration can be verbose; complex setups require JSON editing
- AGPLv3 license has copyleft implications for SaaS embedding use cases
- Enterprise features (RBAC, audit logs, reporting) require paid tiers
- Alerting configuration has historically been complex (improved in v9+)
Pricing
Freemium- · Self-hosted under AGPLv3 license
- · All core panels and visualizations
- · 150+ data source plugins
- · Community support
- · Grafana Cloud managed hosting
- · 10,000 active series (metrics)
- · 50 GB logs, 50 GB traces, 500 GB profiles
- · 14-day retention
- · Usage-based pricing (pay per metric/log/trace ingested)
- · Extended retention (up to 13 months)
- · Unlimited users
- · Basic support SLA
- · Minimum $25,000/year
- · Advanced RBAC and data source permissions
- · Audit logs and compliance reporting
- · SSO/SAML integration
Possible Stacks
Advanced API (Go)
ProjectA high-performance API stack for advanced engineers. Go handles concurrency, PostgreSQL + Redis back the data layer, Kubernetes orchestrates containers, and Prometheus + Grafana provide observability.
Programming
Databases
Hosting
Authentication
DevOps
Observability
GitLab DevOps Stack
ProjectA self-contained DevOps platform for teams that want everything in one place. FastAPI and PostgreSQL handle the application layer; GitLab CI/CD automates testing and container builds; Kubernetes orchestrates deployments; Grafana and Sentry close the observability loop.
Backend
Programming
Databases
Hosting
Airbyte + ClickHouse + Grafana
ProjectAirbyte syncs data from any source into ClickHouse, a columnar OLAP database that handles billions of rows at millisecond query speed. Grafana connects to ClickHouse for real-time dashboards and alerting. Python handles any custom ingestion scripts.
Related Tools
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Learning Resources
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