Enterprise Tooling

Grafana

Open-source analytics and visualization platform for metrics, logs, and traces.

5/5
Pricing: Open Source free; Grafana Cloud from free tier; Enterprise pricing variesVisit Website
Grafana dashboard example

Pros

  • Extensive data source support
  • Beautiful visualizations
  • Active community
  • Unified alerting

Cons

  • Dashboard sprawl risk
  • Performance at scale
  • Complex alerting setup

Best Use Cases

  • •Metrics visualization
  • •Log exploration
  • •Trace analysis
  • •Unified observability

Overview

Grafana has evolved from a metrics visualization tool to a comprehensive observability platform, supporting multiple data sources and visualization types.

Key Features

Multi-Source Dashboards

Connect to Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and 80+ other data sources in a single dashboard.

Powerful Visualizations

Rich library of panels including graphs, heatmaps, tables, and geomaps.

Alerting

Unified alerting across multiple data sources with flexible notification routing.

Explore Mode

Ad-hoc querying for logs and traces without pre-built dashboards.

Best For

  • Teams using multiple observability tools
  • Organizations needing customizable dashboards
  • Environments requiring log-metric-trace correlation
  • Cost-conscious monitoring setups

Limitations

  • Dashboard management at scale
  • Performance with many panels
  • Alert configuration complexity
  • Learning curve for advanced features

Our Take

Grafana is the go-to visualization platform for cloud-native observability. Its flexibility, data source support, and active community make it invaluable for infrastructure teams.

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