Grafana

Grafana is an open-source platform for visualization, monitoring, and observability. It enables users to create interactive dashboards composed of panels that display metrics, logs, and traces from multiple data sources in real time. Grafana is widely used to observe application performance, infrastructure health, and business metrics across IT operations, development, and analytics teams.

dashboards in Grafana are built with a template-driven query editor, allowing users to pull data from diverse data sources, apply transformations, and mix data on a single dashboard. The core product focuses on visualization, while alerting lets users define rules that trigger notifications through channels such as email, Slack, PagerDuty, or custom webhooks. Grafana supports a rich ecosystem of plugins for data sources, visualizations, and apps, enabling integrations with popular monitoring stacks.

Data sources include Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Graphite, OpenTSDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Microsoft SQL Server, among others. In addition, Grafana is commonly used with the companion projects Loki for logs and Tempo for traces, providing a unified view of metrics, logs, and traces. Grafana can read from multiple sources in a single dashboard and supports user management, roles, and permissions, as well as enterprise features in Grafana Enterprise for governance and scalability.

Grafana originated in 2014, created by Torkel Ödegaard, and has grown into a major platform in the observability space. The Grafana open-source product is released under the AGPLv3 license, while Grafana Labs offers commercial options including Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud as hosted services. The platform is widely adopted by organizations of varying sizes for monitoring, analytics, and decision making.