Grafana review covering dashboards, Prometheus, Loki and Tempo integration, alerting, pricing tiers and top alternatives for observability teams in 2026.
Grafana began life in 2012 as a Kibana fork built by Torkel Odegaard specifically for visualizing time-series metrics, and it became the company Grafana Labs (originally Raintank) in 2014. Today it is best known as the open source visualization and alerting layer that sits on top of metrics, logs and trace data wherever that data already lives, rather than requiring teams to migrate into a proprietary data store.
The company has grown into a fully remote-first organization with roughly 1,800 employees across more than 50 countries, and it has raised about 1.09 billion dollars in venture funding, reaching unicorn status in 2021 at a 6 billion dollar valuation with backers including Sequoia Capital, Coatue and GIC.
Grafana connects to more than 150 data sources through its plugin architecture, including Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Elasticsearch and every major cloud provider's native monitoring service, letting teams build unified dashboards that mix metrics, logs and traces in a single pane.
Beyond dashboards, the platform includes unified alerting, an ad hoc Explore query mode, Grafana OnCall for incident escalation, Synthetic Monitoring, k6 load testing, and newer AI-assisted features like anomaly detection and natural-language dashboard generation.
The open source core is free to self-host under the AGPLv3 license. Grafana Cloud adds a managed hosting option starting with a generous free tier covering 10,000 active metric series and 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles per month with 14-day retention.
Paid Cloud tiers run from a Pro plan at roughly 19 dollars per month plus usage, through an Advanced tier around 55 dollars per month, up to custom Enterprise contracts that typically start near a 25,000 dollar annual commitment.
Yes. The open source core is free to self-host, and Grafana Cloud also offers a free tier with 10,000 metric series and 50 GB of logs, traces and profiles per month.
Grafana is the self-hosted open source software; Grafana Cloud is Grafana Labs' fully managed hosting service built around the same software plus the LGTM stack.
No. Grafana is primarily a visualization and alerting layer that queries external data sources like Prometheus, Loki or Elasticsearch rather than owning the underlying data.
LGTM stands for Loki (logs), Grafana (visualization), Tempo (traces) and Mimir (metrics), Grafana Labs' complementary open source observability projects.
Many teams use Grafana paired with Prometheus, Loki and Tempo as a lower-cost, vendor-neutral alternative to closed observability suites like Datadog and New Relic.
Grafana's core code has been licensed under AGPLv3 since 2021, after previously being licensed under Apache 2.0.