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Grafana
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Grafana

Grafana is an open source observability and dashboard platform — a self-hostable Datadog alternative that connects to Prometheus, Loki, databases, and 150+ other sources to visualize metrics, logs, and traces and alert on them in one place.

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What is Grafana?

Grafana is an open source platform for visualizing and monitoring your data. It connects to time-series databases and other sources — Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres, MySQL, and many more — and turns them into dashboards, graphs, and alerts, without moving or copying the data into Grafana itself.

What is Grafana best for?

Teams that run their own monitoring stack and want one screen for metrics, logs, and traces across many systems. It’s the standard front end for Prometheus and the wider Grafana LGTM stack (Loki, Tempo, Mimir), and it suits SREs, DevOps engineers, and anyone who needs custom operational dashboards and alerting on their own infrastructure.

What can Grafana do?

  • Query and combine 150+ data sources — Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, SQL databases, cloud providers, and more — in a single dashboard
  • Build dynamic, reusable dashboards with template variables and a large library of panel types
  • Explore metrics and logs ad hoc, with split views to compare side by side
  • Define alert rules visually and route notifications to Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, email, and webhooks
  • Mix multiple data sources in one graph to correlate signals
  • Extend it with community and commercial plugins, or share dashboards from grafana.com

Where does Grafana fall short?

  • It visualizes and alerts on data but does not store it — you still have to run and scale the underlying databases (Prometheus, Loki, etc.) yourself, and the real capacity planning lives in those backends, not in Grafana.
  • Some capabilities — reporting, role-based access control, and certain enterprise data source plugins — are reserved for the paid Enterprise and Cloud tiers.

Is Grafana free?

Yes — Grafana OSS is free to self-host under the AGPLv3 license, and you only pay for your own infrastructure. Grafana Cloud is the managed option with a free tier (10,000 metric series, 50 GB of logs, 14-day retention, three users) and usage-based Pro and Enterprise plans on top.

What does Grafana replace?

Grafana is a self-hosted alternative to Datadog and other hosted observability suites. It covers the dashboards, monitoring, and alerting layer on your own infrastructure, so you avoid per-host, usage-based billing — though, unlike Datadog, you also run the data collection and storage yourself.

FAQ

Is Grafana open source? Yes. Grafana’s core is licensed under AGPLv3 (it moved from Apache 2.0 in 2021). The code is public and free to self-host; the AGPL’s network clause mainly affects companies that modify Grafana and offer it as a hosted service.

Can I self-host Grafana for free? Yes. Self-hosting Grafana OSS is free — you only pay for the server and the databases it queries. Grafana Cloud is the paid, managed alternative.

Is Grafana a good Datadog alternative? For teams willing to run their own stack, yes — you get powerful dashboards and alerting without usage-based billing. Datadog is easier if you want collection, storage, and visualization handled for you as one managed service.

What do I need to run Grafana? A server (Docker, a binary, or a package install) plus at least one data source to visualize — commonly Prometheus for metrics and Loki for logs. Grafana itself is lightweight; the data backends are what need capacity planning.