Grafana

Grafana is an open-source observability platform for querying, visualizing, and alerting on metrics, logs, and traces. Grafana OSS provides dashboards and data-source plugins for systems such as Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, SQL databases, and cloud monitoring services. Grafana Cloud adds managed telemetry storage, integrations, alerting, and operational features, while Grafana Enterprise adds commercial plugins, support, and governance for self-managed deployments.

✨ Key Features

• Data-source connections — Query metrics, logs, traces, profiles, SQL databases, APIs, and cloud monitoring systems without moving the source data into Grafana.
• Dashboards and panels — Arrange query results into reusable dashboards with panels, rows or tabs, links, annotations, and visualization-specific controls.
• Explore and query editing — Run free-form queries against a data source, inspect results, and iterate before turning an investigation into a dashboard panel.
• Grafana Alerting — Evaluate queries and expressions from multiple data sources, define alert rules, and route notifications through contact points and notification policies.
• Metrics, logs, and traces correlation — Explore Prometheus/Mimir metrics, Loki logs, Tempo traces, and other signals in connected views for incident investigation.
• Dashboard sharing and reporting — Share dashboards or panels through links, snapshots, embeds, and exports; Grafana documentation also describes automatic PDF reporting.
• Access control and administration — Manage organizations, folders, teams, roles, data-source permissions, and other administration settings; Enterprise and Cloud add deeper governance controls.

💳 Pricing

Grafana OSS is free to self-manage, with infrastructure and operating costs borne by the operator. Grafana Cloud has a Free tier and paid usage.

Pro has a US$19/month platform fee; rates vary by volume. Free retention is 14 days; listed Pro retention is 13 months for Metrics and 30 days for Logs. Cloud Enterprise uses custom terms with a US$25,000 annual minimum commitment where listed. Check product-specific units and the current calculator.

⚖️ Alternatives Compared

🎯 Use Cases

• SRE incident response — Correlate metrics, logs, and traces in dashboards and Explore to investigate an outage or elevated error rate.
• Kubernetes and infrastructure monitoring — Connect Prometheus, cloud monitoring, databases, or other sources and track service health in reusable views.
• Application performance troubleshooting — Query request metrics and logs, annotate deployments, and use alert rules to shorten detection and diagnosis loops.
• Centralized alert operations — Evaluate signals across multiple data sources, route notifications to the right contact point, and manage alert policies from one view.
• Managed telemetry at scale — Use Grafana Cloud integrations and usage controls when a team prefers hosted storage, retention, and support options.