What is Grafana?
Grafana lets teams build dashboards and alerts on top of existing data sources rather than owning the data itself, connecting to Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, and 150+ other plugins through a single query and visualization layer.
Read the full overview
Grafana Labs, founded in 2014 by Torkel Odegaard, also maintains Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), Mimir (long-term metrics storage) and OnCall, together marketed as the "LGTM" observability stack. The core Grafana server is AGPLv3-licensed.
Sources checked 27 September 2026: official site, documentation, GitHub repository.
GrafanaMonitoring & ObservabilityOpen source dashboards and observability across many data sources
Key capabilities
A drag-and-drop dashboard builder, alerting engine with multi-channel notifications, role-based access control, dashboard-as-code via provisioning or Terraform, and a plugin ecosystem covering most common metrics/logs/traces backends.
Where Grafana fits
Infrastructure and application monitoring dashboards, log exploration via Loki, distributed tracing via Tempo, and unified alerting across mixed data sources.
Positioning and limitations
Grafana competes with Datadog and Kibana as a visualization layer, but differentiates by staying data-source agnostic: it doesn't require the LGTM stack specifically and can dashboard data already stored in Datadog, CloudWatch, or a relational database.
Because Grafana is decoupled from any single backend, teams can standardize on one dashboarding tool even while running Prometheus for some services and a commercial APM for others, avoiding a full platform migration to get unified visibility.
“Open source dashboards and observability across many data sources”
Technical details
- Access
- Self-hosted
- Source model
- Open source
- License
- Verify license
- Founded
- 2014
- Headquarters
- New York, USA
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- API
- Available
- Version reference
- v13.2.2 ↗
- Source checked
- September 27, 2026
- Website
- grafana.com ↗
- GitHub
- Source repository ↗
What to verify
Start from the users, systems and operating responsibilities the tool needs to support.
- Confirm current features, licensing and support terms.
- Validate deployment, data location and access control.
- Test integrations, exports and recovery workflows.
Reviews of Grafana
The best open source dashboarding tool5/5 starsGrafana is the backbone of our monitoring stack. We connect it to Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo, and it handles everything from infrastructure dashboards to business metrics. The alerting system is solid and the community creates amazing dashboard templates. Cannot imagine running our infrastructure without it.
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