GSH

Grafana

Self-hosted dashboards, alerting and exploration for metrics, logs and traces from many data sources.

Observability

Grafana is an open source platform for querying, visualizing, alerting on and exploring metrics, logs and traces wherever they are stored, with dashboards and data source plugins for systems such as Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch and Postgres. Operators run it themselves from packages for Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/Fedora, SUSE/openSUSE, macOS and Windows, from official Docker images, or on Kubernetes with Helm; its configuration data lives in an embedded SQLite database or an external MySQL 8.0+ or PostgreSQL 12+ instance. The open source edition is free under AGPL-3.0-only, and a licensed Grafana Enterprise edition for self-hosting adds Enterprise data source plugins, SAML, team sync, RBAC, data source permissions and query caching but has no published price. Grafana Labs' paid offers are the managed Grafana Cloud plans: Free at 0 USD with lower limits and 14-day retention, Pro from 19 USD per month plus usage, and Enterprise starting at a 25,000 USD per year spend commit.

Key features

Grafana OSS (self-hosted)Free self-hosted
LicenceOpen source · AGPL-3.0-onlyDeploymentSelf-hosted
Grafana Enterprise (self-hosted licence)Price on request
LicenceProprietaryDeploymentSelf-hosted
Limits, notes & source

Grafana OSS (self-hosted)

Limits
The complete OSS feature set: dashboards, Explore, alerting and every data source plugin that is not Enterprise-only. No licence key and no user limit is documented.
Notes
The repository README states "Grafana is distributed under AGPL-3.0-only"; the LICENSE file is the full GNU Affero General Public License version 3. Being an OSI licence, AGPL-3.0 carries no licence fee for running it yourself.
Source
raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/grafana/main/README.md ↗

Grafana Enterprise (self-hosted licence)

Limits
Adds Enterprise data source plugins, SAML, enhanced LDAP with active sync, team sync, RBAC, data source permissions, query and resource caching, reporting, custom branding, usage insights, auditing and long-term support to the OSS feature set.
Notes
No price is published for a self-hosted Enterprise licence: the documentation says "To purchase or obtain a trial license, contact the Grafana Labs Sales Team", and the vendor calls Grafana Enterprise "a commercial edition of Grafana".
Source
grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/introduction/grafana-enterprise ↗

Pros & cons

Strengths

  • AGPL-3.0 licensed: free to install and run on your own infrastructure. Source
  • A single dashboard can mix data sources, chosen per query. Source
  • Alert rules are evaluated continuously and notify Slack, PagerDuty or OpsGenie. Source

Trade-offs

  • SQLite is the default database but is not recommended for production. Source
  • Image rendering needs a separate service sized at 16 GiB memory and 4 CPU cores. Source
  • SAML, team sync, RBAC, data source permissions and reporting are Enterprise-only. Source
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  • No published price for a self-hosted Enterprise licence; you have to contact sales. Source

Grafana replaces

Products this app is built to take over from, with the vendor's own evidence.

Moving your content across: Documented per product: what you do on the side you are leaving, what this app does with the result, and what does not survive the trip. Every step links to the page that documents it.

  • DatadogGrafana Labs publishes a comparison page describing Grafana as an alternative to Datadog, with a migration plan.Source
    • ImportGrafana Cloud ingests Datadog metrics from the Datadog Agent (DD_ADDITIONAL_ENDPOINTS) or Vector's Datadog metrics sink, translating them into Prometheus; dashboards go through the Datadog Dashboard Translator.Source
    • CaveatThe Datadog proxy that receives those metrics has been deprecated since 6 June 2024 and keeps working only for accounts that used it in the previous year; Grafana now points at OTLP translation instead.Source
    • ImportGrafana's alternative for the deprecated path is translating Datadog metrics into OTLP with the OpenTelemetry Collector and Grafana Alloy, which you run yourself.Source
    • CaveatThe dashboard translator is internal tooling for Grafana Cloud Enterprise customers — you have to contact sales — and it covers dashboards only: alarms and logs are not supported.Source
    • CaveatDatadog screenboards convert to fixed-grid timeboards, and widgets without a counterpart (heatmaps, SLOs, service maps, log streams, free text) become text panels or are dropped.Source
  • ElasticsearchGrafana Labs' own comparison page positions Grafana over Elastic for observability log analytics and describes migrating log workloads.Source
    • ImportGrafana's Elasticsearch data source queries your existing indices directly — the cluster URL, index name and time field are enough; no data has to be reindexed or copied.Source
    • CaveatGrafana Labs' comparison page offers no tool for moving ELK data or Kibana dashboards and pitches Grafana Cloud: teams run Grafana on top of Elastic "before migrating a single byte".Source