Grafana
Dashboards and visualisation over Prometheus, Zabbix, databases and clouds.
Open source Cloud + desktop
- Platforms
- Linux/Windows/macOS/Docker, web; cloud
- Licence
- Open source — AGPL-3.0; Grafana Cloud free + paid
- Price
- Free (OSS); Grafana Cloud free tier + paid
- Category
- Monitoring & observability
- Updated
- 2026-11-05
What it is
Grafana is a visualisation and analytics platform. It plugs into Prometheus, Zabbix, databases and cloud providers and builds interactive dashboards and alerts — a single pane of glass over whatever other systems already measure.
Problems it removes
- Your metrics live in several systems and you want one dashboard across all of them.
- Teams need self-service dashboards without touching the data sources.
How administrators use it
- Add Prometheus and Zabbix as data sources and build shared dashboards.
- Define alert rules and route them to on-call channels.
Strengths & trade-offs
Strengths
- Connects to almost any data source.
- Excellent dashboards.
- OSS plus a managed cloud.
Trade-offs
- It visualises, it does not collect — you still need a metrics backend.
- Alerting setup takes some learning.
Common questions
Does Grafana store metrics itself?
No — it visualises data from backends like Prometheus or Zabbix; you still need a data source.
Is Grafana free?
The open-source edition is free; Grafana Cloud has a free tier plus paid plans.