Grafana

Overview

Grafana is an open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It functions as a comprehensive platform for querying, visualizing, alerting on, and understanding metrics, logs, and traces from various data sources. The platform supports a wide array of backend data stores, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, and Loki, allowing users to consolidate operational data into unified dashboards.

Developed by Grafana Labs, Grafana provides tools for creating custom dashboards with a drag-and-drop interface, offering a range of visualization options such as graphs, heatmaps, tables, and stat panels. These dashboards can display real-time data, historical trends, and aggregated insights, making them suitable for monitoring system performance, application health, and business metrics. The platform is used by developers, operations engineers, and data analysts to gain insights into their infrastructure and applications.

Grafana's core strength lies in its ability to integrate with diverse data sources without requiring data migration, allowing organizations to maintain their existing monitoring stacks while centralizing visualization. Its alerting engine enables users to define rules based on metric thresholds, sending notifications through channels like Slack, PagerDuty, and email. The open-source nature of Grafana, coupled with its flexible plugin architecture, has fostered a large community that contributes to its ecosystem, including custom panels and data source connectors. For example, the developer community frequently shares custom dashboard templates on sites like Grafana Labs' own dashboard library and platforms such as The New Stack, showcasing practical applications of the platform's extensibility.

Beyond the open-source distribution (Grafana OSS), Grafana Labs offers commercial products such as Grafana Cloud, a fully managed service, and Grafana Enterprise, which provides additional features like enhanced security, support, and data source connectors for large organizations. The platform also includes specialized tools like Grafana Loki for logs, Grafana Mimir for metrics, and Grafana Tempo for traces, forming a cohesive observability stack.

Key features

• Unified Dashboards: Create interactive dashboards to visualize data from multiple sources, supporting various panel types like graphs, tables, heatmaps, and stat panels (Grafana Documentation on Panels).
• Multi-Source Data Connectivity: Connect to a wide range of data sources, including Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and cloud monitoring services.
• Alerting & Notifications: Define alert rules based on metric thresholds and send notifications to channels such as email, Slack, PagerDuty, and custom webhooks (Grafana Alerting Guide).
• Templating & Variables: Utilize dashboard variables to create dynamic and reusable dashboards, allowing users to filter and switch contexts without modifying the underlying queries.
• Plugin Architecture: Extend functionality with a rich ecosystem of plugins for new data sources, panel types, and applications contributed by the community and Grafana Labs.
• Query Editor: Powerful query editors tailored to each data source, offering features like auto-completion and syntax highlighting.
• Annotations: Mark events on graphs to correlate deployments, outages, or other significant occurrences with data trends.
• Data Transformations: Apply transformations to data before visualization, such as aggregation, filtering, and joining results from different queries.

Pricing

Grafana offers a free open-source version, a free cloud tier, and paid plans for managed services and enterprise features. The information below is accurate as of May 2026.

Common integrations

• Prometheus: A popular open-source monitoring system, often used as a primary data source for metrics in Grafana dashboards (Connect Prometheus to Grafana).
• Loki: Grafana's open-source log aggregation system, designed to be cost-effective and easy to operate, integrating directly with Grafana for log visualization (Connect Loki to Grafana).
• Mimir: Grafana's open-source, horizontally scalable, long-term storage for Prometheus metrics, providing high availability and durability (Configure Grafana Mimir as a Prometheus Data Source).
• Tempo: Grafana's open-source distributed tracing backend, offering high-volume trace ingestion and integration with Grafana for trace visualization (Connect Tempo to Grafana).
• Elasticsearch: A distributed search and analytics engine often used for logs and metrics, which Grafana can query and visualize (Connect Elasticsearch to Grafana).
• Cloud Monitoring Services: Integrates with AWS CloudWatch, Google Cloud Monitoring, and Azure Monitor for visualizing cloud infrastructure and application metrics (Add AWS CloudWatch Data Source).
• Databases: Connects to SQL databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL, and NoSQL databases like InfluxDB and Cassandra, to visualize application and business data.

Alternatives

• Datadog: A SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform that integrates infrastructure, application performance, and log management.
• New Relic: An observability platform offering APM, infrastructure monitoring, logs, and synthetic monitoring.
• Splunk: A platform for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data via a web-style interface.

Getting started

To get started with Grafana, you can download and install the open-source version or sign up for Grafana Cloud. The following example demonstrates how to set up a basic Grafana instance using Docker and add a Prometheus data source. This will allow you to start building dashboards to visualize metrics.

First, create a docker-compose.yml file:

version: '3.8'

services:
  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana:latest
    container_name: grafana
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    volumes:
      - grafana-storage:/var/lib/grafana
    restart: unless-stopped

  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:latest
    container_name: prometheus
    ports:
      - "9090:9090"
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
      - prometheus-storage:/prometheus
    command: --config.file=/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml --web.enable-remote-write-receiver
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  grafana-storage:
  prometheus-storage:

Next, create a prometheus.yml file in the same directory as your docker-compose.yml. This configuration tells Prometheus to scrape its own metrics:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'prometheus'
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['localhost:9090']

Run the Docker containers:

docker-compose up -d

Grafana will be accessible at http://localhost:3000 (default login: admin/admin). Prometheus will be at http://localhost:9090.

To add Prometheus as a data source in Grafana:

1. Log in to Grafana.
2. Click the gear icon (Configuration) on the left sidebar, then select "Data sources".
3. Click "Add data source" and choose "Prometheus".
4. Set the HTTP "URL" to http://prometheus:9090 (this is the service name within the Docker network).
5. Click "Save & test". You should see "Data source is working".

You can now create a new dashboard and add panels to visualize metrics from your Prometheus data source, such as prometheus_target_scrapes_total to see how many times Prometheus has scraped targets.