Grafana
Open-source dashboards and visualization for all your metrics
Grafana is profiled here as a DevOps tool for engineering teams. Read about features, pricing, and how it compares to related options in the tools directory.
Description
Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform created by Torkel Ödegaard in 2014 and developed by Grafana Labs. It queries dozens of data sources, from Prometheus and Loki to SQL databases and cloud monitoring services, and renders them in shared, alert-driven dashboards without moving the data. Grafana has become the common visualization layer across infrastructure, application, and increasingly LLM observability stacks. Templating variables and a large plugin ecosystem let one dashboard serve many environments and reach new data sources without rebuilding it. Shared dashboards and unified alerting let on-call teams correlate signals from several systems in one view.
Key Capabilities:
Dashboards over Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, SQL, and cloud sources
Unified alerting with multi-channel notifications
Data source plugins for a wide range of backends
Templating with variables for reusable dashboards
Mixed queries that correlate metrics, logs, and traces
AGPL-licensed core with Grafana Cloud and enterprise options
Alternative tools
- OpenTelemetry
Vendor-neutral standard for traces, metrics, and logs
- Prometheus
Open-source metrics monitoring and time-series database
- Porter
Platform-as-a-service that runs in your own cloud account
- Kamal
Deploy containerized apps to your own servers
- SeaweedFS
Fast distributed file and object store you run yourself
- Ansible
Agentless automation for configuration and provisioning