Grafana is the dashboard tool many engineering teams reach for first. It connects to data sources such as Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, and cloud monitoring services, and lets you build panels and dashboards that visualize time-series data, with alerts that notify teams when something goes wrong. Because it does not store data itself, it can sit on top of whatever you already collect, which is a major reason it is so widely adopted.
Grafana Labs has built a broader observability stack around it. Loki handles logs, Tempo handles traces, and Mimir stores metrics at scale, and together with Grafana they form the LGTM stack, which can be self-hosted or used through Grafana Cloud. Additional products cover on-call alerting, synthetic monitoring, application and frontend observability, and performance testing. Grafana Assistant uses AI to help write queries, build dashboards, and investigate issues in plain language.
The core software is open source, and Grafana Cloud has a free tier with usage limits and paid plans based on usage, with enterprise options. Running a self-hosted stack takes expertise, and costs in the cloud depend on the volume of data. Datadog, New Relic, and Dynatrace are commercial all-in-one competitors with more automation and higher prices, while Kibana serves Elasticsearch users. Grafana suits teams that value open standards and flexibility.