Grafana

Operational dashboards for everyone

Open-source metrics visualization and observability platform for time-series data.

Our take

Grafana is the open-source standard for metrics visualization — if you're running Prometheus, InfluxDB, or any time-series data source, Grafana is the default dashboard layer. Self-hosted OSS is completely free with no feature restrictions, making it the best-value option in monitoring visualization. Grafana's plugin ecosystem (300+ data source plugins) means it visualizes data from almost any backend without custom code. The Grafana Labs cloud products (Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics, Grafana for visualization) form a full open-source observability stack competitive with Datadog at a fraction of the cost — teams self-hosting the LGTM stack (Loki/Grafana/Tempo/Mimir) pay infrastructure costs rather than per-seat SaaS fees. The tradeoff vs Datadog: Grafana requires operational investment to run at scale, Datadog is managed with enterprise support. For engineering teams with Kubernetes/DevOps capacity, Grafana self-hosted is dramatically cheaper than Datadog.

Product roadmap

Grafana Labs is unifying the LGTM (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) observability stack with a converged user experience, expanding AI-powered anomaly detection and automated root cause analysis, and building SLO management features. The commercial cloud product competes directly with Datadog's observability suite.