Grafana

Overview

Grafana is a visualisation and dashboarding layer that queries data where it already lives. It stores no telemetry itself, which is the whole point: it reads Prometheus, Azure Monitor, Datadog and dozens of others side by side.

Grafana Labs separately publishes a backend stack you can adopt or ignore, covering metrics, logs, traces, profiles, a collector and load testing.

The licence changed and older descriptions are wrong. Grafana moved from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3 in April 2021, verified in the licence file, with specific front-end packages remaining Apache 2.0.

It matters which project you mean, because the stack is not uniform: the visualisation tool, logs, metrics, traces, profiles and load testing are all AGPLv3, while the collector is Apache 2.0.

Grafana Labs chose AGPLv3 deliberately over the source-available licences its peers adopted, on the grounds that it remains an approved open-source licence.

Commercially it layers three ways: Enterprise for self-managed deployments, Cloud as a hosted service, and an advanced tier adding bring-your-own-cloud and a federal offering.

The Enterprise pitch is telling. It includes more than fifty premium data sources, explicitly naming Datadog, Splunk, Snowflake and New Relic, so Grafana is designed to sit on top of its own nominal competitors.

Its free cloud tier is unusually generous and worth knowing about: ten thousand active metric series, fifty gigabytes each of logs, traces and profiles, three users and fourteen days of retention, permanently.

One product change to note: the open-source on-call tool entered maintenance mode in 2025 and was archived in March 2026, replaced by a cloud incident response product. The licence did not change, the product decision did.

The current direction is AI, with an assistant now generally available, investigations in preview and a knowledge graph for correlating entities, metered per AI user and per million tokens.

Key features and capabilities

The same headings are used for every pipeline & infrastructure monitoring entry, so two tools can be read side by side.

What it collects

• Grafana visualises anything a data source plugin can query, and originates no telemetry of its own
• The Grafana Labs stack covers metrics, logs, traces and profiles as separate components
• Cloud adds frontend observability billed per session, synthetics, and load testing by virtual-user hour
• Kubernetes, application and database observability are billed in host and container hours

How data gets in

• Alloy is the recommended collector, Apache 2.0 licensed and OpenTelemetry-compatible
• Cloud accepts Prometheus remote write, the OpenTelemetry protocol, and its own native protocols
• Logs are metered in three stages, processing, writing and retaining, which shows up directly in the price
• Grafana Labs staff are OpenTelemetry code owners, so upstream instrumentation is a first-class input

Storage and retention

• Grafana itself stores dashboards and configuration, not telemetry
• Cloud free tier retains metrics, logs, traces and profiles for fourteen days
• Cloud Pro retains metrics for thirteen months and everything else for thirty days
• Metrics are billed by active series, which is the practical cardinality control
• The enterprise tier offers custom retention; no hard cardinality ceiling is published

Querying and dashboards

• Dashboards across heterogeneous data sources simultaneously, which is the defining capability
• Native PromQL against Prometheus-compatible sources, with its own languages for logs and traces
• An assistant now generally available for natural-language querying, with investigations in preview
• A knowledge graph for correlating entities across signals

Alerting and incident response

• Grafana Alerting is in the open-source product, with rules evaluated by Grafana itself
• Cloud incident response management is the paid product, billed per active user
• The open-source on-call tool is in maintenance mode and was archived in March 2026
• Enterprise adds recorded queries for tracking trends over time
• Service level objective specifics are not published

Ecosystem and standards

• Enterprise includes more than fifty premium data sources, naming Datadog, Splunk, Snowflake and New Relic
• Enterprise also adds role-based access, scheduled PDF reporting, usage insights, auditing and query caching
• SAML single sign-on and team synchronisation with Okta, GitHub, GitLab and Google in Enterprise
• It consumes Prometheus and Azure Monitor as data sources, so it complements rather than replaces them
• Contributes upstream to OpenTelemetry, and ships its collector under a permissive licence

Where it runs and what it costs

• Self-hosted open source under AGPLv3, self-managed Enterprise, or Grafana Cloud
• Cloud advertises 28 regional offerings across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure
• The enterprise tier adds a federal cloud with high compliance ratings, and bring your own cloud
• Priced as a platform fee plus per-resource usage, across series, gigabytes, host hours and users

Pricing

Open sourceFree and AGPLv3; Cloud from $19 a month

Self-hosting is free under AGPLv3. Cloud has a permanent free tier of 10,000 active series, 50 GB each of logs, traces and profiles, three users and fourteen days of retention. Pro starts at a $19 monthly platform fee plus usage: metrics from $6.50 per thousand series, logs at $0.05, $0.40 and $0.10 a gigabyte across processing, writing and retaining, users at $8 each and the AI assistant at $20 per AI user. The advanced tier starts at a $25,000 annual commitment. Self-managed Enterprise is quote-only.

Vendor pricing page →

Demos and videos

• Getting started with Grafana Webinar or talk · YouTube
• Grafana channel Channel or playlist · YouTube

About Grafana Labs

Grafana was created by Torkel Ödegaard in December 2013, and Grafana Labs was co-founded by Ödegaard with Raj Dutt, its chief executive, and Anthony Wood; it publishes neither a headquarters nor a headcount. It is private and well-funded, raising $220m in 2021, a $240m Series D in April 2022 led by GIC with J.P. Morgan joining alongside Sequoia, Coatue and Lightspeed, and a $270m transaction in 2024. It reports more than $400m in annual recurring revenue, over 7,000 customers and 70% of the Fortune 50. Grafana is AGPLv3; Enterprise is under a separate commercial licence.

Founded 2013 · grafana.com