Grafana
The most recommended of 16 observability platforms
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.
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.
112 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 71
- criticize it
- 41
- approval share
- 63%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 71 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Easy to set up
“It works well and is trivial to setup, but the complexity explodes once your metric volume or cardinality requires more scale”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” “found Grafana + Prometheus + Loki fairly easy to setup”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” Strong dashboards and visualization
“Grafana dashboards itself (paired with VictoriaMetrics and occasionally Clickhouse) is one of the most pleasant web apps IMO.”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” “Grafana seems to be the best free querying frontend across multiple data sources right now”
Comment from 23 Aug 2026 in “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)” “Doesn't seem like this can visualize over data stored in Honeycomb like Grafana can”
Comment from 7 Nov 2025 in “OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel” Works well with Prometheus and Loki
“the very vanilla (prometheus -> central thanos, fluentbit -> central loki, grafana) ends up on top”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” “I use Grafana Alloy (running in Docker) and Grafana Cloud for this”
Comment from 31 Mar 2026 in “Monitor Claude Code Usage with Grafana” “found Grafana + Prometheus + Loki fairly easy to setup”
Comment from 13 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s” - Comment from 3 May 2026 in “I rebuilt my blog's cache. Bots are the audience now”
Built-in alerting and notifications
“now that it's in the Grafana stack you can also use standard alert management & notification tools”
Comment from 31 Mar 2026 in “Monitor Claude Code Usage with Grafana” “Having all of them made it trivial for the LLM to start with an alert”
Comment from 4 Sep 2026 in “Ask HN: Who is using MCP in production?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Complexity grows with scale and products
“It works well and is trivial to setup, but the complexity explodes once your metric volume or cardinality requires more scale”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” “the lifespan of services being 2-3 years gets painful as you start composing a stack out of enough products”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” “Even doing a single node deployment these days seems complicate with Prometheus, Grafana, etc. etc.”
Comment from 26 Dec 2025 in “I Think about Kubernetes” - Comment from 14 May 2026 in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s”
- Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”
Clunky dashboard building and UI
“Grafana is such a bad experience I want to cry every time I try to build out a service dashboard.”
Comment from 7 Nov 2025 in “OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel” “Grafana is such a bad experience I want to cry every time I try to build out a service dashboard”
Comment from 7 Nov 2025 in “OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel” “the "dark" theme having a *blaring* white banner at the top is an ... interesting design choice”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore” - Comment from 7 Oct 2026 in “Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI”
Features moving behind paid Cloud
“even Grafana Labs are putting more and more new features behind the Grafana Cloud subscription model”
Comment from 27 Mar 2026 in “OpenTelemetry Profiles Enters Public Alpha” “Grafana changed their license tho so you couldn't host OSS Grafana as part of your service.”
Comment from 27 Sep 2026 in “DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec)”
Other observability platforms people recommend
The four most recommended other observability platforms, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GrafanaThis page | 71 | 41 | 63% | 11 | — | — |
| Prometheus | 48 | 24 | 67% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Datadog | 40 | 39 | 51% | 11 | — | — |
| Sentry | 31 | 30 | 51% | 11 | — | — |
| SigNoz | 19 | 2 | 90% | 9 | — | Approved |
What people said
40 of the 130 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I have Grafana and Prometheus set up for observability and was surprised with insights I gained”
“Heck, it can't even read our dashboards most of the time, tripping up on Grafana minutia.”
“Grafana changed their license tho so you couldn't host OSS Grafana as part of your service.”
“Having all of them made it trivial for the LLM to start with an alert”
“IMO Grafana is definitely the best o11y tool when you are just starting out.”
“Within a couple of weeks we have totally non-technical folks with very sophisticated queries in their dashboards.”
“Grafana seems to be the best free querying frontend across multiple data sources right now”
“once you start connecting stuff it starts adding complexity not ease”
“Projects like grafana do stuff like this already. It's a known good pattern.”
“really worth learning how prometheus and grafana heatmaps combine”
“the fact that so much is in the base product gives me the warm fuzzies”
“I did NOT want to host a 5 service stack (grafana, otel collector, prometheus, mimir, loki, k8s)”
“the very vanilla (prometheus -> central thanos, fluentbit -> central loki, grafana) ends up on top”
“found Grafana + Prometheus + Loki fairly easy to setup”
“I prefer to use it graphana + loki + Prometheus setup”
“It's not straightforward to have durable hard to miss alerts about your production enviornment”
“now that it's in the Grafana stack you can also use standard alert management & notification tools”
“I use Grafana Alloy (running in Docker) and Grafana Cloud for this”
“even if you can go a loooong way with a self-hosted Grafana + Tempo”
“even Grafana Labs are putting more and more new features behind the Grafana Cloud subscription model”
“I think netdata or Grafana with a chosen backend is right for you then.”
“Grafana does a lot of heavy lifting in localizing most of the issues.”
“we're seeing great value in rebuilding a Grafana instance from manually managed to scripted dashboards”
“80% of their customers would be perfectly fine with a self hosted instance of grafana”
“contains APM, logs, metrics and alerting with a free tier for tiny projects”
“The metrics I monitor with prometheus and grafana are useful, vital even, but they are always fighting the last war.”
“Even doing a single node deployment these days seems complicate with Prometheus, Grafana, etc. etc.”
“You need something with dashboards to help you understand what's going on.”
“There's so much jargon and so many products involved to just do a little bit of logging.”
“discounting Grafana for implementing multi tenancy solutions and alloy which is pretty fucking good is kind of pointless”
“Grafana dashboards itself (paired with VictoriaMetrics and occasionally Clickhouse) is one of the most pleasant web apps IMO.”
“It works well and is trivial to setup, but the complexity explodes once your metric volume or cardinality requires more scale”
“the "dark" theme having a *blaring* white banner at the top is an ... interesting design choice”
“have learned early on to only use Grafana as opposed to other Grafana products”
“Grafana is still way better if you just stay away from anything that isn't the core product”
“the lifespan of services being 2-3 years gets painful as you start composing a stack out of enough products”
“So far it's pretty good. We're at least one major version behind, but hey everything still works.”
“Doesn't seem like this can visualize over data stored in Honeycomb like Grafana can”
“Grafana is such a bad experience I want to cry every time I try to build out a service dashboard.”
“Grafana is such a bad experience I want to cry every time I try to build out a service dashboard”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.