Grafana is an open source observability platform that connects to any metrics, logs, or traces data source and turns it into actionable dashboards and alerts, without locking your monitoring data into a proprietary system.
The Problem
Datadog and New Relic charge per host and per ingested log line, which makes monitoring costs scale directly with infrastructure growth. Teams running dozens of services can spend more on observability than on the underlying compute. Beyond cost, proprietary monitoring tools own the storage format for your metrics and logs, making it difficult to switch vendors or add new data sources without rebuilding dashboards from scratch.
How Grafana Solves It
Grafana connects to your existing data sources (Prometheus, InfluxDB, Loki, Elasticsearch, Postgres, and 100+ more) without ingesting or copying the data. Dashboards query data in place and visualize it with panels any team member can customize. Alert rules evaluate metric or log conditions and route notifications through Slack, PagerDuty, email, or webhooks. AGPL licensed; self-host the full platform with Docker.
Key Features
- Dashboard builder with 30+ panel types: graphs, heatmaps, stat panels, geo maps, and tables
- Native support for Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and 100+ data sources
- Unified alerting with routing rules, silence policies, and multi-channel notifications
- Explore mode for ad-hoc metric and log queries without building a dashboard first
- Annotation system for marking deployments and incidents directly on time-series panels
- Plugin ecosystem for custom data sources, panel types, and application integrations
Who It's For
Grafana is best for DevOps and platform engineering teams running Prometheus or another self-hosted metrics stack who need a production-ready dashboard and alerting layer without per-host observability fees. It also suits teams with multiple data sources who want a single dashboard rather than separate views in each tool.
Compared to Datadog
Unlike Datadog, Grafana does not charge per host or per log line ingested. You bring your own storage (Prometheus, Loki, or any compatible backend) and Grafana queries it in place, so monitoring costs do not scale with infrastructure size.
