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Grafana

lastmod 2025-12-02created 2019-12-1122 edits

Grafana is a multi-platform open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application.

When connected to supported data sources, it provides charts, graphs, and alerts on the web. A licensed GRafana Enterprise version with additional features is available as a self-hosted installation or as an account on the Grafana Labs cloud service. It is extensible through plugins. End users can create complex monitoring dashboards using an interactive query builder. Grafana is divided into a TypeScript-based frontend and a Go-based backend.

Categories

LGTM

Grafana Labs launched a series of related open-source projects to complement Grafana:

  • Grafana Loki (Logs) - a log aggregation platform inspired by Prometheus first made available in 2019
  • Grafana Mimir (Metrics) - a Prometheus-compatible, scalable metrics storage and analysis tool released in 2022 that replaced Cortex
  • Grafana Tempo (Traces) - a distributed tracing tool, released in 2021
  • Grafana Pyroscope (Profiles) - a continuous profiling tool, released in 2023

LGTM is just the initials of (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir).

What is Grafana?

Grafana is an open-source metric data visualization tool that aims to be a metric analysis platform. It was first released in 2014 under the lead of Torkel Ödegaard, and was initially developed as an open-source dashboard tool supporting Graphite, InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, and others. The overall framework of visualizing metric information and building dashboards remains unchanged, but it now supports many more data sources, including cloud data sources such as AWS CloudWatch and Azure Monitor, and log data based on Loki or ElasticSearch. The enterprise plan also supports integration with external services such as Splunk, New Relic, AppDynamics, Oracle, Dynatrace, ServiceNow, and DataDog.

Grafana is currently developed by Grafana Labs. Grafana Labs is a company that develops open-source applications such as Grafana, Loki, and Tanka, and it attracted a $24M Series A investment in October 2019 and a $50M Series B in August 2020. As of 2020, Grafana Labs has grown into a 170-person company operating remotely across 32 countries, and it also develops commercial services such as Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud.

Grafana is used by various companies including Paypal, ebay, Intel, rackspace, Vimeo, TED, Digital Ocean, and Bloomberg. More detailed and diverse adoption cases can be found on the Grafana website.

Prometheus vs Grafana

See Prometheus#Prometheus vs Grafana for details.

Dashboards

Provides fast and powerful visualizations the way you want, from heatmaps to histograms, graphs, and geo maps.

See also

Favorite site

with Prometheus

Articles

  • Why I can no longer recommend Grafana | GeekNews
    • [Original] The Grafana trust problem
    • The Grafana product line frequently deprecates or replaces major components on short cycles, creating a structure that makes long-term operation difficult
    • Each time a new solution is adopted, the configuration method, DSL, Helm charts, Operator, etc. change repeatedly, making stable maintenance hard
    • CRD compatibility with the Prometheus Operator ecosystem is incomplete: ServiceMonitor and PodMonitor work, but there are support gaps for key features such as AlertmanagerConfig
    • Mimir 3.0 forcibly adds an Apache Kafka dependency, greatly increasing cluster complexity and operational burden
    • Across Grafana Cloud and the Mimir, Loki, and Grafana product line, configuration locations and endpoints change easily, repeating a structure that makes it hard to build once and use for a long time
author Zer0 sitemap