Grafana

Grafana is an open-source data visualization and monitoring platform founded in 2014 by Torkel Odegaard in Stockholm, Sweden, that enables teams to query, visualize, alert on, and understand metrics, logs, and traces from dozens of data sources through customizable dashboards with interactive panels including time series graphs, heatmaps, gauges, tables, stat displays, bar charts, geospatial maps, and node graphs. The multi-source querying connects to Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Graphite, Loki, Tempo, Jaeger, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Monitoring, and over seventy other data sources through plugin architecture, allowing teams to correlate data from different systems in unified dashboards. The alerting system evaluates threshold and anomaly rules against live data, routing notifications through email, Slack, PagerDuty, Discord, Microsoft Teams, webhooks, and other channels with intelligent grouping, silencing, and escalation policies. The dashboard templating uses variables to create parameterized dashboards that dynamically filter data by environment, service, region, or any dimension. The provisioning system supports dashboard and data source management through infrastructure-as-code. Grafana Loki integrates log aggregation, Tempo provides distributed tracing, and Mimir offers scalable metrics storage. The enterprise edition adds role-based access control, audit logs, data source proxy, and single sign-on. Adopted by companies including Bloomberg, JP Morgan, PayPal, and Sony. Designed for site reliability engineers, DevOps teams, and operations staff.