Grafana

Grafana is a full-stack observability platform from Grafana Labs, covering metrics, logs, traces, profiles and k6 performance tests on an OpenTelemetry-native foundation, and named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms.

Adaptive Telemetry is the feature that addresses the problem every observability buyer eventually has. Grafana states plainly that half of telemetry spend is wasted, which matches the experience of most teams: instrumentation is added generously, nobody ever removes it, and the bill grows with data volume rather than with value. The suite identifies the data worth keeping at full fidelity and aggregates the rest, with the company claiming cost reductions of up to 80 percent.

Being OpenTelemetry-native rather than OpenTelemetry-compatible is the architectural point worth checking when comparing vendors. A platform built on the open standard means instrumentation is not proprietary, so changing vendor later does not mean re-instrumenting every service, which is otherwise the reason observability contracts renew regardless of satisfaction.

The AI work runs in two directions, which Grafana summarises as AI for observability and observability for AI. Grafana Assistant interprets production telemetry, Investigations accelerates root cause analysis, and Agent Observability evaluates and improves production AI agents. The Free Forever plan costs nothing and suits personal projects, Pro self-serve starts at 19 dollars a month plus usage with volume discounts, and Enterprise starts at a 25,000 dollar annual spend commitment. Metrics start at 6.50 dollars per thousand active series, falling to 5.90 dollars between 10,000 and 100,000.