Grafana is an open-source platform for monitoring and observability, led by Grafana Labs. Observability means understanding a running system from the data it emits, such as metrics, logs and traces. Grafana queries, visualizes and alerts on this data no matter where it is stored.
A user connects data sources such as Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB or Postgres, with more than 150 plugins available, and builds dashboards of panels: time series graphs, heatmaps and other visualizations. Template variables appear as drop-down menus, so one dashboard can show different servers or services. The Explore view runs ad-hoc queries and compares time ranges side by side. Alert rules are defined visually; Grafana evaluates them continuously and sends notifications. Dashboards and alerts can be deployed as code in a software pipeline, and Git Sync stores and versions dashboards in Git.
Grafana OSS is open source under the AGPL-3.0 license and is installed on the user's own servers. Grafana Labs also sells Grafana Cloud, a managed service with a free tier and usage-based paid plans, and Grafana Enterprise for self-managed installations.