I use Grafana to deploy OpenVideo and to write an article on Medium on how we can deploy some open source projects with CloudFormation.
AWS Cloud Re-Start Program Specialist at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Complex features hinder streamlined user interface and good stability
Pros and Cons
- "Grafana is stable and has great engineers."
- "Grafana is stable and has great engineers."
- "All the features are complicated."
- "The features are complicated and not intuitive."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
I have installed Grafana to see custom metrics like the number of connected users, number of rooms, and CPU usage.
What is most valuable?
All the features are complicated. It's comparable to Terraform, and I prefer CloudWatch.
What needs improvement?
The features are complicated and not intuitive. It would be better if they made the technology easy to use without needing to read extensive documentation. The dashboard interface is too wide, and it's challenging to find buttons or features.
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Grafana
January 2026
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Grafana is stable and has great engineers.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate the scalability at six out of ten. It meets some needs, however, it could be improved.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I prefer CloudWatch over Grafana due to its ease of use.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is too complicated. Even at a junior level, I found it challenging to navigate without guidance.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I prefer CloudWatch with custom metrics.
What other advice do I have?
Make the interface intuitive and user-friendly. Highlight features clearly on the interface so that users can easily find and access them.
I'd rate the solution four out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Managing Partner at a non-profit with 1-10 employees
Provides good alerts and is useful for monitoring user traffic and visualizing metrics
Pros and Cons
- "We like the alert features."
- "The solution must provide tutorials and guides."
What is our primary use case?
We use it to monitor user behavior. We have AI LLM models in NVIDIA Triton. NVIDIA Triton gives us some metrics. These metrics are integrated with Grafana and Prometheus. We monitor user traffic to visualize metrics like p99 latency, increase in user and CPU performance, utilization of the GPUs, RAM utilization, and CPU utilization.
What is most valuable?
We use the free templates of the solution. We have tested some alerts on metrics. We like the alert features. We plan to use it more. Slack and PagerDuty alerts in Grafana are helpful.
What needs improvement?
It was pretty complicated to integrate the product into our workflow. We relied on templates we found on the GitHub open-source repositories. It is pretty hard to integrate Grafana and set it up according to our use case. The solution must provide tutorials and guides.
We are a small team. We don't have the time to learn Grafana end-to-end, but we want some guides to help us use it quickly. Prebuilt templates will help a lot. The product must provide more alerting metrics. It must be integrated with iOS and Android mobile phones.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for four months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The tool’s stability is quite good. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I rate the tool’s scalability a six out of ten. Scaling is complex. We have four developers in the organization who use the product.
How was the initial setup?
We have good Docker experience, so the setup was pretty straightforward. We had to run a couple of Docker commands. We integrated everything with Docker Compose. As we scale up, the setup will get complicated. If the number of users increases, we might consider switching to the cloud.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Compared to Elasticsearch, ELK Stack, and Logstash, Grafana is pretty strong. Grafana is way ahead of its competitors. SigNoz is also an alternative to Grafana and Prometheus. SigNoz is pretty easy to set up.
What other advice do I have?
We haven't worked or dived deep into the documentation and tutorial. I will recommend the product to users willing to take the time and patience to set up and learn Grafana in-depth. There are a lot of tools that we can use to build excellent integrations and get the most out of them with little knowledge. However, to leverage the value of Grafana and Prometheus, we must learn the tools in depth. It will save us time, and we can get much value if we invest time and effort. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Buyer's Guide
Grafana
January 2026
Learn what your peers think about Grafana. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.
881,036 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Software Development Engineer I / Backend Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Easy to define alerts and efficient monitoring capabilities
Pros and Cons
- "The best thing about Grafana is the visualization. The colors and the ease of use make it very user-friendly."
- "Grafana doesn't provide anything for reporting."
What is our primary use case?
I use Grafana for MYSQL monitoring, monitoring the system, and application monitoring.
What is most valuable?
The best thing about Grafana is the visualization. The colors and the ease of use make it very user-friendly. Grafana has a huge community, so we can simply Google it and get the answer if we have any doubts.
The second best thing about Grafana is its alerting system, which is easy to define within Grafana rather than defining alerts in Prometheus.
Thirdly, Grafana is completely free of cost. I use Grafana for many things, and all of them at zero-dollar cost. On the other hand, other monitoring tools in the market, like New Relic and Datadog, offer many features, but Grafana is a good monitoring tool for a small-scale company.
What needs improvement?
One thing I got to know is that Grafana doesn't provide anything for reporting. As a DevOps engineer, I would like to get a weekly report expressing the system's overall performance in the last week. For example, how many alerts were triggered, how many APIs responded with bad requests, and how many failures occurred? All these things are generally required at the beginning of the week so that we can better research and optimize everything that's required.
Currently, Grafana sends a PDF version of the report, and they are not doing anything beyond that. So, that's a feature that Grafana can work on to make it more accurate and better.
In the additional features, I would like to see logs. Logs are basically created when an API is hit. The log contains information such as the API that was hit, the status code, and the time taken. For instance, the log file would store the error message if there was an error in the API. It makes it easier for the developer to debug the API that showed an error. Grafana claims that it has Loki, which is used for logging and saving logs. However, I could not configure Loki with Grafana to see my logs. Grafana could look into this field and make changes to improve it.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for three months now. I am using the latest version, 7.4.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Grafana is stable. There were some bugs in the previous version, but the latest version is bug-free.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Grafana is scalable for product-based companies, but for service-based companies with multiple projects, it's difficult to scale using Grafana. However, since it provides all the features for free, it's manageable.
We are a small company of 70 people, and I am currently the only one using Grafana. We started using it after I researched and decided to use Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support team of Grafana is available for the enterprise and pro versions. However, there is a vast community of Grafana users, and if you require any help, you can post your query, and you will undoubtedly receive an answer. Most likely, your question may have already been asked and answered in the community forum, so checking there first is worthwhile.
How was the initial setup?
Setting up Grafana can be a bit tricky. If I rate the difficulty level on a scale of one to ten, I would say it's around five. But once you have connected one data source, it becomes easier to connect with other things.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Grafana is not entirely open source, as it has three versions: the free, enterprise, and pro versions. Most of the required features are available in the free version of Grafana, which you will use as a visualization tool, while Prometheus will serve as your monitoring tool.
Therefore, you won't use Grafana as a monitoring tool. If you use Grafana's features, they are free of charge. Hence, you can use Prometheus and Grafana to fulfill your needs. However, if you are using MongoDB as your database, its plugin is not available in the free version of Grafana, and you'll need to purchase the enterprise version.
What other advice do I have?
I will be able to comment on whether Grafana is useful for you or not, depending on various factors. For instance, I would like to know the scale of your company, the products you are making, the scale of production, and whether you are a product-based or service-based company. Additionally, I would like to know what other features you require from your monitoring system.
If Grafana meets your criteria, I suggest using it because it is either free or comes at a cost. The free version of Grafana is usually sufficient for most users.
Overall, I would rate Grafana an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Good dashboard features and provides excellent customization
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable aspect is customization. There are many customizations possible, so I like that."
- "I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on; we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors."
What is our primary use case?
My main use case is the dashboard. For example, we have screens created in the last step, and we integrate Grafana with that so that we can see the dashboards with the data. What does the traffic look like? What do the errors look like? So the is our main use case.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable aspect is customization. There are many customizations possible, so I like that.
What needs improvement?
There is room for improvement in terms of stability.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Grafana for more than a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the stability an eight out of ten because sometimes I find issues with Grafana. For example, I am unable to open some services there. Then, we have to open ten different tabs to get it fixed. And it's annoying when there's something going on we want to check Grafana, and it throws four different errors.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have never had any issues with scalability.
Everyone in our organization uses this solution. So, we have over 10,000 end users.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. You simply see what you want to do. You want to add a row. You want to add a panel. So it's easy for me to set it up.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Staff Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
An open-source solution used to build custom dashboards
Pros and Cons
- "Grafana's built-in integration with third-party tools, databases, and MQs is an amazing feature."
- "Setting up alerts via Grafana is a bit complicated, and alerting needs to improve."
What is our primary use case?
I have used Grafana mainly to build custom dashboards. We haven't got Grafana Enterprise due to billing issues. I have used Grafana, installing it physically on a server to build custom dashboards using plug-ins. I have used Enterprise Grafana cloud for many integrations, like RabbitMQ, JMSQs, and datasets. We are mainly focused on dashboards and not on alerting.
What is most valuable?
Grafana's built-in integration with third-party tools, databases, and MQs is an amazing feature. Now they are leading many integration modules as well for RabbitMQ specifically. You will get a prebuilt dashboard. You have to configure the RabbitMQ, and you will have all the monitoring available. You don't have to actually develop a dashboard and identify what needs to be monitored.
What needs improvement?
Setting up alerts via Grafana is a bit complicated, and alerting needs to improve. We used Azure for our alerts and Grafana purely as a dashboard tool.
The solution's stability needs improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Grafana for three to four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have come across multiple issues with Grafana, like getting shut down automatically, the process getting killed, etc. Grafana, on a main level, is good, but the stability of the underneath platform supporting Grafana's UI needs to be improved.
I rate Grafana an eight out of ten for stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
While using the Grafana open-source version, scalability will definitely be a big challenge because you are not using an enterprise version. Grafana's open-source version is not scalable. It's useful for small use cases and specific use cases. Using the Grafana open-source version will be challenging if you want to deploy a hundred applications and bring up a hundred dashboards for different reasons. While it is possible to do, you will end up having issues.
How are customer service and support?
For open source, Grafana does not have technical support. It has an open forum where you can post your questions, and they will respond to you. However, their response on the open forum was good. Being an open-source solution, having a big community to support is an added advantage compared to other tools.
How was the initial setup?
Grafana's deployment takes around two hours. It's not super complicated, and it's pretty straightforward. Everything is available on the internet. You can browse the internet and get a bunch of documents to complete the deployment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost.
What other advice do I have?
It's very good to start with the open source and very seamless. You can directly connect your data sources to the solution. You won't have to worry about managing the Grafana UI because Grafana comprises two things, namely, the data source where you are connecting and the dashboard. Getting started with Grafana Cloud is good because it's very seamless, good, and helpful. If you want to scale and use Grafana as an observability tool, I would say you have to think twice before choosing it because there are a lot of gaps, especially on the APM side of its application and performance monitoring side. The infrastructure gets complex as it scales. For a small use case, for independent use cases, or for building simple dashboards, I recommend Grafana.
With Grafana's open-source, you download a package, put it in your server, and run it. I've used Grafana Cloud as well. For Grafana open-source, the login is limited to two or three people. More people cannot log in, and you can create multiple users. You can create around five to six dashboards and use 10 to 12 plugins. If you have just one or two use cases to be used, like if you have order delivery and you are looking for a tool, Grafana is a great one because the integration is pretty simple.
Overall, I rate Grafana a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Head SRE Latam at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Feature-rich and has many integrations and good community support
Pros and Cons
- "What I found most valuable in Grafana is that it has a lot of integrations and features that I need for data processing and visualization."
- "One area for improvement in Grafana is that depending on your version, you have to pay for the features, making the license expensive. It would be great if the licensing model could be more flexible. In the next release of Grafana, I want cluster creation to be available, which would help in Grafana deployment and scaling. Currently, the scaling process for the solution is a bit complicated."
What is our primary use case?
We use Grafana for application metrics and data utilization for consumer databases. We also use it to connect and evaluate clients and create databases where we upload client data.
How has it helped my organization?
We find Grafana essential for our company because of the visualization function for all application metrics in our environment.
What is most valuable?
What I found most valuable in Grafana is that it has a lot of integrations and features that I need for data processing and visualization.
What needs improvement?
One area for improvement in Grafana is that depending on your version, you have to pay for the features, making the license expensive. It would be great if the licensing model could be more flexible.
In the next release of Grafana, I want cluster creation to be available, which would help in Grafana deployment and scaling. Currently, the scaling process for the solution is a bit complicated.
Easier integration is also what I want to see in Grafana in the future.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Grafana for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Grafana is a very stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scaling Grafana is a bit complicated, so I want to create a cluster to promote high availability in the solution, deploy in one step, and for Grafana to scale automatically.
How are customer service and support?
My company has the open-source version of Grafana, so it gets support from the community. The community support is good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In terms of standalone visualization tools, I've only used Grafana. I used another monitoring solution, but the visualization was only integrated.
Other solutions can provide what Grafana provides, but you need to pay. Grafana, on the other hand, has an open-source version, and as an open-source solution, it's complete, at least for my company's needs.
Compared to other software, it can take some time to get used to how Grafana works, but you can live with it because you can learn to use it.
How was the initial setup?
One person deployed Grafana for my company, and the process only took twenty minutes maximum.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free.
What other advice do I have?
I'm currently using Grafana.
My company is a Grafana customer.
I'm using the open-source version of Grafana, 9.3.
Between sixty and one hundred people, mostly software engineers, use the solution in my company.
Grafana requires maintenance, and that's the responsibility of the entire team.
There's a plan to increase the usage of Grafana in other areas besides engineering. My company plans to create dashboards for data in other areas.
I advise people who want to use the solution to try it out first. For example, Grafana has many good integrations if you need to gather metrics, and you can technically use any query to create dashboards and graphs inside Grafana. I advise that you explore the solution.
My rating for Grafana is eight out of ten because it's a very good product. It's complete and has an open-source version with many features. However, some of its interface capabilities could be cheaper.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Information Technology Operations Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Good dashboard and user forums but needs more plugins
Pros and Cons
- "The dashboards are very easy to work with."
- "There are not a lot of plugins for financial market monitoring."
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution in a financial institution to monitor applications and infrastructure.
What is most valuable?
We really only started.
So far, the management is very good.
The dashboards are very easy to work with.
It's a fantastic tool.
Support is helpful. There are many useful forums users can turn to as well.
It can scale.
The stability is good.
What needs improvement?
There are not a lot of plugins for financial market monitoring. Our old tool had more plugin capabilities.
We need more AI features. We need more data analytics and monitoring done by AI.
For how long have I used the solution?
We just started using the solution. We haven't used it for that long.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very stable. There are no issues with reliability. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I'd rate the scalability nine out of ten. It can extend well.
How are customer service and support?
The team that is implementing the solution has relied quite a bit on the support and forums, and so far, it has been helpful. So far, we are satisfied with the level of support on offer.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used to use a different solution. It had very specific tools for fixed message monitoring, among other features, that were useful for finance companies. Grafana doesn't have much that tailors to our sector.
How was the initial setup?
I was not involved in the implementation. I work with the team that has implemented it.
What other advice do I have?
We're a customer and end-user.
We are likely using the latest version of the solution. I'm not sure of the version number.
I'd rate the solution six out of ten. So far, I can't say it's doing more than our older monitoring was doing.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Technical Lead at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Good dashboards, stable, and scalable
Pros and Cons
- "The dashboards are the most valuable features."
- "The technical support has room for improvement."
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution for integrated logging, which works on our Kubernetes cluster and our separate VM.
How has it helped my organization?
The solution allows our teams to search and conduct application troubleshooting.
What is most valuable?
The dashboards are the most valuable features.
What needs improvement?
I would like to have a better configuration in the next release.
The technical support has room for improvement.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution for five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I give the stability an eight out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I give the scalability an eight out of ten.
We have five users in our organization.
How was the initial setup?
I give the initial setup an eight out of ten. There was a lack of support documents to help with the deployment. We just need to configure the file to plan the cluster.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I give the price an eight out of ten.
What other advice do I have?
I give the solution an eight out of ten.
We use Grafana with a Kubernetes filter and it works well. I am not sure how the solution will work on its own.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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