# Grafana 71 Hacker News commenters recommended Grafana and 41 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Free, open-source dashboard and monitoring tool that people use to visualize metrics, logs and alerts; the main caveat is complexity grows quickly as the stack and data volume scale. ## Why people recommend it - Easy to set up (2 comments): "It works well and is trivial to setup, but the complexity explodes once your metric volume or cardinality requires more scale" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935384)) "found Grafana + Prometheus + Loki fairly easy to setup" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48120519)) - Strong dashboards and visualization (3 comments): "Grafana dashboards itself (paired with VictoriaMetrics and occasionally Clickhouse) is one of the most pleasant web apps IMO." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935481)) "Grafana seems to be the best free querying frontend across multiple data sources right now" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49405370)) "Doesn't seem like this can visualize over data stored in Honeycomb like Grafana can" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45848408)) - Works well with Prometheus and Loki (4 comments): "the very vanilla (prometheus -> central thanos, fluentbit -> central loki, grafana) ends up on top" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125585)) "I use Grafana Alloy (running in Docker) and Grafana Cloud for this" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47584430)) "found Grafana + Prometheus + Loki fairly easy to setup" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48120519)) - Built-in alerting and notifications (2 comments): "now that it's in the Grafana stack you can also use standard alert management & notification tools" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47585488)) "Having all of them made it trivial for the LLM to start with an alert" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567658)) ## What people warn about - Complexity grows with scale and products (5 comments): "It works well and is trivial to setup, but the complexity explodes once your metric volume or cardinality requires more scale" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935384)) "the lifespan of services being 2-3 years gets painful as you start composing a stack out of enough products" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935060)) "Even doing a single node deployment these days seems complicate with Prometheus, Grafana, etc. etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46396582)) - Clunky dashboard building and UI (4 comments): "Grafana is such a bad experience I want to cry every time I try to build out a service dashboard." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845962)) "Grafana is such a bad experience I want to cry every time I try to build out a service dashboard" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845895)) "the "dark" theme having a *blaring* white banner at the top is an ... interesting design choice" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935307)) - Features moving behind paid Cloud (2 comments): "even Grafana Labs are putting more and more new features behind the Grafana Cloud subscription model" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47542069)) "Grafana changed their license tho so you couldn't host OSS Grafana as part of your service." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49862325)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Prometheus](https://hackerapproved.com/p/prometheus.md): 48 recommend - [Datadog](https://hackerapproved.com/p/datadog.md): 40 recommend - [Sentry](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sentry.md): 31 recommend - [SigNoz](https://hackerapproved.com/p/signoz.md): 19 recommend - [Superlog](https://hackerapproved.com/p/superlog.md): 15 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Grafana", https://hackerapproved.com/p/grafana/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).