Grafana

What it is

Grafana is an open-source platform for querying, visualizing, alerting on, and exploring metrics, logs, and traces regardless of where they’re stored. It was created by Torkel Ödegaard in 2014 as a fork of Kibana focused on time-series dashboards, and is now developed by Grafana Labs, the company Ödegaard co-founded around it. Grafana itself doesn’t store data — it connects to dozens of data sources (Prometheus, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, CloudWatch, and many more via plugins) and renders dashboards, so it’s typically the visualization layer sitting on top of whatever backends a team already runs.

Grafana Labs also builds and maintains several of the backends commonly paired with it — Grafana Loki for logs, Grafana Tempo for traces, Grafana Mimir for long-term Prometheus-compatible metrics storage, and Grafana Pyroscope for continuous profiling. Together these are informally known as the “LGTM” (or now “LGTM+P”) stack. All of these components, including Grafana itself, are open source, and Grafana Labs sells Grafana Cloud, a fully managed SaaS version of the entire stack, as its commercial offering.

Why teams choose it

• Vendor-neutral by design. Because Grafana queries external data sources rather than owning storage, teams can swap or mix backends (self-hosted Prometheus, a cloud vendor’s metrics API, Elasticsearch for logs) without changing the dashboarding layer or retraining users.
• Deep plugin and panel ecosystem. Community and commercial data source plugins cover most databases and cloud APIs, though quality and maintenance vary a lot across the plugin catalog — some are official, others community-maintained and less polished.
• Alerting is unified but not always simple. Grafana’s built-in alerting can evaluate rules against any connected data source, which is convenient, but managing alert routing and notification policies at scale has a steeper learning curve than a purpose-built alerting tool.
• The “LGTM” stack is genuinely well-integrated — trace-to-logs and metrics-to-traces correlation works smoothly when using Grafana Labs’ own backends, less so when mixing in third-party stores.

Pricing model

Grafana the visualization tool is free and open-source (AGPLv3-licensed core, with some enterprise-only plugins and features under a commercial license). Grafana Labs’ commercial revenue comes primarily from Grafana Cloud, a hosted SaaS offering with a free tier and paid tiers that scale with usage (active series, log/trace ingestion volume, and similar consumption metrics), plus Grafana Enterprise for self-managed deployments needing enterprise support and extra features.

Alternatives

For dashboarding specifically, Kibana (Elastic’s visualization layer, often paired with Elasticsearch) and Splunk’s native dashboards are the closest open-source-adjacent alternatives. For teams wanting an integrated commercial platform instead of assembling their own stack, Datadog, New Relic, and Dynatrace bundle visualization with their own data collection and storage.