Grafana

What is Grafana?

Grafana is the de-facto open-source visualization and dashboarding platform. It connects to data sources — Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, Elasticsearch, Tempo/Jaeger for traces, SQL databases, cloud monitoring APIs — and renders them as dashboards: graphs, heatmaps, tables, gauges, and alert rules. The key thing to understand is that Grafana stores nothing: it’s a query-and-display layer that sits on top of whatever databases actually hold your data. It’s the “single pane of glass” most teams put in front of their observability stack.

Grafana + Prometheus, and the boundary between them

The canonical pairing is Grafana + Prometheus: Prometheus scrapes and stores metrics, Grafana queries and visualizes them. Understanding the division of labor prevents the most common confusion — Prometheus is the database and query engine; Grafana is the eyes. Grafana’s power is that it’s source-agnostic: one dashboard can combine a metrics panel from Prometheus, a logs panel from Loki, and a traces panel from Tempo, giving a unified view across all three pillars of observability without moving data between systems. This is why Grafana became ubiquitous — it doesn’t compete with your data stores, it unifies them.

The Grafana ecosystem and where costs hide

“Grafana” today spans more than dashboards. Grafana Labs ships Loki (logs), Tempo (traces), Mimir (scalable long-term Prometheus storage), and Grafana Cloud (their hosted stack) — a full observability suite built around the visualization core. That’s worth knowing when evaluating: adopting Grafana can mean adopting an ecosystem. On cost: self-hosted Grafana is free, but the storage behind it (long-retention metrics, high-volume logs) is where spend accumulates, and managed observability pricing often scales with data volume and cardinality — the bill tends to come from the data layer, not Grafana itself. Alerting lives in Grafana too, overlapping with Prometheus’s Alertmanager; teams should pick one alerting path to avoid duplicate, conflicting alerts.

What people get wrong

• Thinking Grafana stores data — it’s a visualization layer; the metrics/logs live in Prometheus, Loki, etc.
• Duplicating alerting: running both Grafana alerts and Alertmanager for the same signals creates noise and confusion.
• Underestimating data-layer cost — Grafana is free, but the storage volume behind rich dashboards is what drives the bill.

Primary source: Grafana documentation

Grafana as a Multi-Source Visualization Layer

While Grafana is frequently paired with Prometheus, its actual design is deliberately data-source-agnostic — it can visualize data from dozens of different backends simultaneously (Prometheus, Elasticsearch, various SQL databases, cloud provider-native monitoring services, and many others) within the same dashboard, letting teams build unified views that draw from multiple underlying systems rather than needing separate visualization tools per data source. This flexibility is a major reason Grafana has become close to a default choice for observability dashboards across the industry, independent of which specific metrics, logging, or tracing backends an organization has chosen to standardize on underneath it.