Grafana is an open-source analytics and interactive visualization platform that has become the industry standard for observability dashboards. Originally created in 2014 as a fork of Kibana, it has evolved into a comprehensive observability platform with Grafana Loki (logs), Grafana Tempo (traces), Grafana Mimir (metrics), and Grafana OnCall (incident management).
The platform's strength lies in its data source flexibility — it can query and visualize data from over 150 different sources simultaneously, making it the perfect 'single pane of glass' for organizations using multiple monitoring tools. Its alerting system supports complex rules with multi-dimensional alerts.
Grafana is licensed under AGPL v3 and completely free to self-host. Grafana Cloud provides a managed experience with a generous free tier (10,000 metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces per month). Enterprise features include SAML/LDAP auth, reporting, and enhanced support.