Grafana
What it is: Open-source monitoring and observability platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces.
What It Does Best
Time-series data. Built for monitoring. Server metrics, application performance, infrastructure health.
Data source flexibility. Connects to everything: Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, MySQL, Postgres, CloudWatch.
Alerting. Set thresholds, get notified. Slack, email, PagerDuty integration.
Pricing
Open source: Free
Grafana Cloud: Free tier, then $8/month per user
Enterprise: $25+/user/month
When to Use It
✅ Infrastructure monitoring
✅ Application performance metrics
✅ DevOps/SRE teams
✅ Time-series visualization
When NOT to Use It
❌ Business analytics (use Tableau/Power BI)
❌ Non-time-series data
❌ Don't have metrics infrastructure
Bottom line: Industry standard for monitoring dashboards. If you need to visualize how your systems are performing, Grafana is the default choice.