Grafana Observability Platform

Grafana is a free and open-source observability and data visualization platform that allows users to query, visualize, alert on, and understand metrics, logs, and traces from multiple data sources. Created by Torkel Odeberg and Anthony Woods at Orbitz in 2014 (spun out as an independent company, Grafana Labs, by Raj Dutt in 2015), Grafana has become the most popular open-source dashboarding tool, used by over 750,000 active installations including PayPal, Bloomberg, and Sony. Key features: dashboards: create rich, interactive dashboards composed of panels. Each panel displays data from a data source using visualization types including time series graphs, stat panels, gauges, bar charts, pie charts, heatmaps, tables, node graphs, geomaps, and canvas panels. Dashboards support templating (variables that can be changed interactively), annotations, and time range controls. Data sources: Grafana supports over 150 data source plugins including Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Loki, Tempo, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Jaeger, Zipkin, Datadog, Azure Monitor, AWS CloudWatch, and Google Cloud Monitoring. Alerts: unified alerting system that evaluates rules across all data sources. Alerts can trigger notifications to Slack, PagerDuty, email, Discord, Microsoft Teams, webhook, and other channels. Alert routing via notification policies. Grafana Loki: log aggregation system integrated with Grafana. Grafana Tempo: distributed tracing backend. Grafana Mimir: scalable Prometheus-compatible metrics backend. Provisioning: configuration as code via YAML provisioning files for dashboards, data sources, alert rules, and notification channels. Authentication: LDAP, OAuth (Google, GitHub, GitLab, Azure AD), SAML, and basic auth. Role-based access control (RBAC). Plugins: extend Grafana with data source plugins, panel plugins, and app plugins. Written in Go (backend) and TypeScript/React (frontend). AGPL-3.0.