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Home/Categories/Security & Monitoring/Grafana
icon of Grafana

Grafana

Open source alternative to Datadog, New Relic and

image of Grafana
Contents
  1. 01Who Grafana is for

Repository

Stars
3K
Forks
354
License
Apache-2.0
Latest
v0.14.0
Last commit
22 days ago
Last verified
May 13, 2026
Repo
grafana/mcp-grafana ↗
Dynatrace

Grafana is an open source observability platform for querying, visualizing, and alerting on metrics, logs, and traces from any data source. AGPL licensed; self-host or use Grafana Cloud.

3K starsGoApache-2.0Active this month
Visit websiteGitHub repo
  • 02The problem it solves
  • 03How it solves it
  • 04Strengths and trade-offs
  • 05Tech stack
  • 06FAQ
  • 07Similar open-source tools
    • TL;DR

    Grafana is an observability and dashboard platform for querying, visualizing, and alerting on metrics, logs, and traces. It replaces proprietary monitoring dashboards for teams that want broad data-source support and self-managed visibility.Apache-2.0 · Go · 3K stars · Active this month

    who it's for

    Who Grafana is for#

    SRE teams centralizing visibility

    Use Grafana to create shared dashboards and alerts across the systems that already produce operational telemetry.

    Skip if:

    You want a single vendor to own collection, storage, dashboards, and incident workflows end to end.

    Platform teams exposing service health

    Use Grafana to publish standard views for infrastructure, applications, and customer-impacting service metrics.

    Skip if:

    Your organization has no consistent metrics or logging sources yet.

    the problem

    The problem it solves#

    how Grafana solves it

    How it solves it#

    Multi-source dashboards

    Grafana connects to many data sources, letting teams build dashboards across metrics, logs, traces, and infrastructure data.

    Alerting and visualization

    Teams can turn operational signals into panels and alerts, which helps reduce context switching during incidents.

    Extensible observability ecosystem

    Grafana has a broad plugin and integration ecosystem, including newer automation surfaces such as the Grafana MCP server.

    strengths · trade-offs

    Strengths and trade-offs#

    Strengths

    • Works across existing monitoring stacksGrafana can sit on top of current data systems, which helps teams avoid replacing storage just to standardize dashboards.
    • Strong fit for incident responseShared dashboards and alerting give on-call engineers a common operational view when services degrade.

    Trade-offs

    • -Dashboards require maintenanceGrafana does not make observability useful automatically. Teams still need naming discipline, alert ownership, and dashboard cleanup.
    tech stack · detected from GitHub

    What it's built on#

    Languages
    GoPython
    frequently asked

    FAQ#

    What is Grafana used for?

    Grafana is used to visualize and alert on operational data from many data sources, including metrics, logs, and traces.

    Does Grafana store all observability data itself?

    Grafana is primarily a visualization and alerting layer. It commonly connects to separate data stores such as metrics, logging, and tracing systems.

    Is Grafana only for DevOps teams?
    also worth a look

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    Additional details

    Language
    Go
    Open issues
    91
    Contributors
    85
    First release
    2024

    Categories

    Security & MonitoringData & AnalyticsDevOps & CI/CD

    Tags

    MonitoringObservabilityData VisualizationDevOps ToolsCloud NativeOpen CoreSecurityError Tracking

    Engineering teams often scatter operational data across metrics systems, log tools, tracing backends, and cloud consoles. When dashboards and alerts live in separate vendor interfaces, incident response slows down and teams lose a shared view of system health.

    The practical need is a common observability surface that can query many backends without forcing every team into one storage vendor. Dashboards must be understandable during incidents, not just attractive during planning.

    No. DevOps and SRE teams are common users, but product, support, and business teams also use Grafana dashboards when operational data matters to their work.