The dashboard layer that ties your observability together, and what it is not.
Grafana is probably the most recognisable face in observability: the dashboards. But it is worth being precise about what Grafana is, and just as importantly, what it is not.
How the open-source observability stack fits together. Grafana is the pane of glass on the right.
What is Grafana?
Grafana is an open-source platform for visualising and exploring data. It does not store your telemetry itself. It connects to the systems that do, Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo or Jaeger for traces, and dozens of others, and turns them into dashboards, graphs and alerts in one place. It is made by Grafana Labs, who also build much of the surrounding stack, including Loki, Tempo, Mimir and the Alloy collector. Grafana 13 landed at GrafanaCON 2026.
The stack it anchors
Grafana is the front of what is often called the LGTM stack: Loki for logs, Grafana for visualisation, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics at scale. You do not have to use all of it, Grafana happily sits on top of Prometheus and other backends, but the pieces are designed to fit.
What it does well
One pane over many sources. Metrics, logs and traces from different systems, correlated in a single dashboard.
Data-source agnostic. It does not lock you into one backend; you point it wherever your data lives.
Huge ecosystem. Community dashboards, plugins and alerting mean you rarely start from scratch.
From the trenches
Ask a platform team about Grafana in anger and the word that comes back is sprawl. The easiest change anyone makes is to duplicate a dashboard, tweak one panel, and keep the original tags, and a year of that leaves you with hundreds of near-identical boards nobody quite trusts. The cost is not storage, it is time to the right answer during an incident, which is the worst moment to be hunting.
The teams who stay sane treat dashboards as code, lean on template variables so one parameterised board replaces fifty copies, and alert on symptoms rather than causes. This is the practical face of a point worth repeating: a green dashboard is not a healthy system, it is a picture of what someone once chose to measure. Grafana will render whatever you point it at, faithfully. Whether it renders the thing that matters is on you.
The honest ledger
It is a window, not a warehouse. Grafana shows your data; it does not store or collect it. You still need the backends underneath.
A green dashboard is not a healthy system. Grafana will faithfully show you what you chose to measure, which is not always what matters. Visibility and understanding are different things.
Dashboard sprawl is real. Without discipline you end up with hundreds of dashboards nobody trusts. Curate ruthlessly.
So, is Grafana for you?
If you have observability data in more than one place, Grafana is close to essential as the layer that brings it together. Just remember it is the viewing glass. The value is in the signals you choose to put behind it, and in whether anyone acts on them.
How many dashboards does your team actually trust? The honest number is usually small. Reply, or book a slot and tell me what you found.
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Sources / further reading
Grafana project: grafana.com
Grafana 13 at GrafanaCON 2026: grafana.com
Grafana dashboard best practices, on avoiding sprawl: grafana.com/docs