Grafana

Grafana is an open-source data visualization and dashboard tool for engineering teams, run self-hosted or as Grafana Cloud with usage-based pricing.

Grafana turns metrics, logs, traces and profiles into shared dashboards, so the people running a system can read its state on one screen. It connects to the data sources a team already uses, from Prometheus and Elasticsearch to a SQL database. Grafana Labs develops it; the company is registered as Raintank Inc. The same product runs as open-source software on your own servers, as the hosted Grafana Cloud and as Grafana Enterprise. Each dashboard is built from panels, including a Geomap panel for regions and points and a table panel with sortable columns and cross-filtering. Annotations mark an event or a time range directly on a graph, and version history keeps every saved change with a Restore button. Grafana Alerting evaluates rules and routes notifications through contact points such as email, Slack and Microsoft Teams. Metrics Drilldown opens the series behind a chart without a query, while forecasting flags values outside their predicted range. Grafana Assistant is an AI chat pane that can run a Loki query and chart the result. Site reliability and platform engineers on Kubernetes are the core users, along with application teams watching service and frontend performance. Teams that already run Prometheus, Loki or Tempo add them as data sources and keep one view across all of them. Organisations with strict security rules can self-host the open-source edition. The Enterprise plan adds premium support and deployment on Public Cloud, Federal Cloud or a customer's own cloud account. Operations rooms run dashboards full screen in kiosk mode, with playlists rotating through them on a wall display. Platform leads use Cost Management and Billing to attribute observability spend by cluster or namespace. Business teams build dashboards on MySQL, PostgreSQL or Microsoft SQL Server tables, or on a Google Sheet, and Reporting emails them as a PDF on a schedule. When an alert fires, the on-call engineer opens the linked dashboard, drills into the metric and moves to the RCA workbench to line up the events behind it.