What is Grafana used for?

Grafana is an open-source platform for visualizing metrics, logs and traces from many data sources, with dashboards, alerting and ad-hoc exploration. It is a good fit for dashboards for Prometheus metrics; unified view of metrics, logs and traces; and on-call alerting for infrastructure teams.

Is Grafana open source?

Yes. Grafana is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at grafana/grafana and is written mainly in TypeScript.

Yes. Grafana is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.

Can I self-host Grafana?

Yes. Grafana can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Grafana an alternative to?

Grafana is an open-source alternative to Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and New Relic. Other open-source alternatives to Datadog include SigNoz, OpenObserve and Prometheus.

Is Grafana actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Grafana was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v13.2.3, published on 29 September 2026. The project has 77k stars on GitHub.

Grafana: open-source alternative to Datadog, Dynatrace

About Grafana

Grafana is a visualization and observability platform that lets you query, chart and alert on data wherever it is stored. It does not hold your data itself; it connects to sources such as Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL and brings their results together in shared dashboards.

Dashboards can be made reusable with template variables that appear as dropdowns, and a single graph may mix queries against different data sources. Explore views support ad-hoc queries, side-by-side comparison of time ranges and a jump from metrics to logs while keeping label filters. Alert rules are defined visually, and notifications go to systems like Slack, PagerDuty, VictorOps and OpsGenie. Panel plugins add further visualization types.

Grafana is AGPL-3.0 licensed, written in Go and TypeScript, and can be installed on your own servers; Grafana Labs also runs a hosted offering. It is common in DevOps and SRE teams as the dashboard layer on top of Prometheus-style monitoring, and a public demo site lets you try it first.

Key features

Dashboards with template variables
Mixed data sources in a single graph
Visual alert rules with Slack and PagerDuty
Explore view for ad-hoc metric and log queries
Panel plugins for extra visualizations
Connects to Prometheus, Loki and SQL databases

Good fit for

→Dashboards for Prometheus metrics
→Unified view of metrics, logs and traces
→On-call alerting for infrastructure teams

Built with: TypeScript; Go; MySQL; PostgreSQL
Tags: dashboards; observability; monitoring; visualization; metrics; logs; alerting; prometheus; analytics

Grafana: questions and answers

What is Grafana used for?: Grafana is an open-source platform for visualizing metrics, logs and traces from many data sources, with dashboards, alerting and ad-hoc exploration. It is a good fit for dashboards for Prometheus metrics; unified view of metrics, logs and traces; and on-call alerting for infrastructure teams.
Is Grafana open source?: Yes. Grafana is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at grafana/grafana and is written mainly in TypeScript.
Is Grafana free?: Yes. Grafana is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.
Can I self-host Grafana?: Yes. Grafana can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Grafana an alternative to?: Grafana is an open-source alternative to Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and New Relic. Other open-source alternatives to Datadog include SigNoz, OpenObserve and Prometheus.
Is Grafana actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Grafana was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v13.2.3, published on 29 September 2026. The project has 77k stars on GitHub.