grafana
by grafana
Grafana is a web platform that turns metrics, logs and traces from many data sources into dashboards and graphs. It is used to monitor servers and applications and to send alerts when something goes wrong.
- Stars
- 77.5k +23 a day
- Licence
- AGPL-3.0
- Runs on
- A small server
- Setup
- Moderate
- Language
- TypeScript
- Age
- 4702 days
What you can do with it
- Build dashboards that show metrics from sources such as Prometheus, Postgres, MySQL or Elasticsearch
- Search and explore logs and compare time ranges side by side
- Set alert rules that send notifications to Slack, PagerDuty or OpsGenie
Could replace
- Datadog
- Splunk
Our suggestion based on what it does, not a feature-by-feature comparison.
Make money with it
A freelancer could set up and maintain monitoring dashboards and alerting for small companies as a paid service.
An idea, not financial advice. Check the licence before charging for anything built on it.
Ways a business could use it
- Monitor website and server uptime in one place, so problems are spotted early without paying for a hosted monitoring service
- Build live dashboards of sales, orders or customer data from an existing database to share with a team or clients
Can you use it commercially?
Free to use. Anything you distribute that includes it must be open-sourced under the same licence. Running it as an online service also counts, so a hosted version must offer its source.
Not legal advice. Read the project's licence file before building a product on it.
Getting it running
Install it from a download, package or Docker image following the official installation guides, then connect your data sources.
Follow the official instructions in the project README.
Things to check
- AGPL-3.0 licence requires sharing source changes if you offer a modified version as a network service
- Needs separate data sources, such as Prometheus, to be set up before it shows anything useful
Checked 27 Oct 2026. Summary drafted by AI from the project's README.
