{"slug": "grafana", "name": "Grafana", "category": "observability", "category_name": "Monitoring and analytics", "description": "Open-source dashboard and visualization platform for metrics, logs and traces.", "recommenders": 8, "commenters": 25, "warners": 2, "score": 9.306, "rising": -1.29, "first": "2025-11-08", "latest": "2026-10-16", "why": "HN commenters use it as the dashboard layer of a self-hosted, open-source stack with Prometheus, Loki and Tempo, and as a cheap, low-maintenance alternative to Datadog.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 8, "neutral": 15, "compare": 0, "warn": 2}, "spark": [2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 2, 1, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": ["Self-hosted stack", "Data source flexibility"], "caveat": "Multiple query languages", "short_quote": "we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month.", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/grafana/grafana", "official_url": "https://grafana.com", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["Grafana"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters use it as the dashboard layer of a self-hosted, open-source stack with Prometheus, Loki and Tempo", "cites": [{"id": 790428832, "item_id": 49401802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "by": "losingthefight", "date": "2026-08-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo.", "excerpt": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo. I use an Alloy sidecar taking in OTEL and scraping logs.feom my Go services and selfhost the stack. Once you need to scale it gets a bit more complicated but it's all still OSS. The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but", "context": "runs OSS stack for personal and consulting jobs", "use_case": "self-hosted observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}, {"id": 767336051, "item_id": 47958503, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958503", "by": "faangguyindia", "date": "2026-04-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "just using simple scripts + graphana + prometheus + Loki and for alloy/nodeexporter", "excerpt": "These days I just use a few languages: 1. Go, when I first saw code I wrote almost a decade ago still compiles and runs in Go, I decided to use Go for everything. There were some initial troubles when I started using it a decade ago, but now it's painless. 2. Haskell, I use it for DSL and state machines. 3. Bash for all deployment scripts and everything. 4. TypeScript, well for the frontend. Lately, I\u2019ve been using G", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring and alerts", "switched_from": "", "story": "Functional Programmers need to take a look at Zig"}, {"id": 780906259, "item_id": 48806641, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48806641", "by": "canntstand", "date": "2026-07-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "a full monitoring stack (Grafana + Prometheus + Loki + Grafana Alloy, etc.)", "excerpt": "Hi everyone! I wanted to share a project I\u2019ve been working on called ServeHub-2. It\u2019s designed as an out-of-the-box solution for anyone looking for a ready-to-use, hybrid self-hosted architecture with a complete monitoring and backup system. The project is tailored for Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch Linux. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/canntstand/ServeHub-2 I completely automated the setup via Ansible, Docker conta", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "I built an out-of-the-box self-hosting infrastructure. How can I improve it?"}, {"id": 768154180, "item_id": 48009636, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48009636", "by": "godzillafarts", "date": "2026-05-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Grafana + Prometheus monitoring everything.", "excerpt": "Recently went through a similar kick in the pants with both Apple (photos, videos, etc.) and Google (Nest thermostats). I have been piecemeal migrating various services that my home uses into a self-hosted services on my homelab, following this as a rough (hardware) guideline: https://mini-rack.jeffgeerling.com/ There are self-hosted versions of everything you're asking about. You could conceivably create a relativel", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "home monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is a hands-off, family-friendly, de-Googled \"home lab\" feasible?"}]}, {"text": ", and as a cheap, low-maintenance alternative to Datadog.", "cites": [{"id": 746096977, "item_id": 46631061, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631061", "by": "physicles", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month.", "excerpt": "I can't get over how expensive these observability platforms are. Last I looked (and looked again just now), if we were to take all our structured logs from all services and send them to Datadog with our current retention policy, it would just about double our current IT spend. Instead, we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month. What am I missing? What'", "context": "", "use_case": "log observability", "switched_from": "Datadog", "story": "I built Vector. Now I'm answering the question your observability vendor won't"}, {"id": 790428832, "item_id": 49401802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "by": "losingthefight", "date": "2026-08-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo.", "excerpt": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo. I use an Alloy sidecar taking in OTEL and scraping logs.feom my Go services and selfhost the stack. Once you need to scale it gets a bit more complicated but it's all still OSS. The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but", "context": "runs OSS stack for personal and consulting jobs", "use_case": "self-hosted observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}]}, {"text": " Caveats include a separate query language for each data source", "cites": [{"id": 790428832, "item_id": 49401802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "by": "losingthefight", "date": "2026-08-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo.", "excerpt": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo. I use an Alloy sidecar taking in OTEL and scraping logs.feom my Go services and selfhost the stack. Once you need to scale it gets a bit more complicated but it's all still OSS. The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but", "context": "runs OSS stack for personal and consulting jobs", "use_case": "self-hosted observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}]}, {"text": ", a stack too heavy for small devices", "cites": [{"id": 766809106, "item_id": 47925569, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47925569", "by": "matebajusz", "date": "2026-04-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana) was too heavy for small devices.", "excerpt": "I've been hosting one of my side projects on AWS. The project actually did quite well for a while, generating a few thousand euros per month. Then COVID hit, regulations changed, and the problem it solved basically disappeared overnight. Revenue dropped to zero, the startup credits I received held out for quite some time, after that I kept the project running, paying out of pocket, thinking maybe it would recover. Th", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Remote Access for Home Assistant Without Nabu Casa"}]}, {"text": ", and weaker offerings outside the core visualization product.", "cites": [{"id": 734962609, "item_id": 45935163, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935163", "by": "theteapot", "date": "2025-11-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But Grafana is still way better if you just stay away from anything that isn't the core product", "excerpt": "https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards (Kibana fork) is one. But Grafana is still way better if you just stay away from anything that isn't the core product: data visualization and exploration (explorer and traces).", "context": "", "use_case": "data visualization and exploration", "switched_from": "", "story": "I can't recommend Grafana anymore"}, {"id": 800089040, "item_id": 50005565, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50005565", "by": "mingus88", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "make the free plugin a nightmare to manage to coax folk into paying for it", "excerpt": "And then the authors realize this and make the free plugin a nightmare to manage to coax folk into paying for it That is the entire business model of grafana", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: GitHub refuses to remove cracked copies of my software after a month"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Self-hosted stack", "summary": "Commonly self-hosted alongside Prometheus, Loki, Tempo and Alloy as a fully open-source observability stack.", "quotes": [{"id": 790428832, "item_id": 49401802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "by": "losingthefight", "date": "2026-08-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo.", "excerpt": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo. I use an Alloy sidecar taking in OTEL and scraping logs.feom my Go services and selfhost the stack. Once you need to scale it gets a bit more complicated but it's all still OSS. The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but", "context": "runs OSS stack for personal and consulting jobs", "use_case": "self-hosted observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}, {"id": 767336051, "item_id": 47958503, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958503", "by": "faangguyindia", "date": "2026-04-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "just using simple scripts + graphana + prometheus + Loki and for alloy/nodeexporter", "excerpt": "These days I just use a few languages: 1. Go, when I first saw code I wrote almost a decade ago still compiles and runs in Go, I decided to use Go for everything. There were some initial troubles when I started using it a decade ago, but now it's painless. 2. Haskell, I use it for DSL and state machines. 3. Bash for all deployment scripts and everything. 4. TypeScript, well for the frontend. Lately, I\u2019ve been using G", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring and alerts", "switched_from": "", "story": "Functional Programmers need to take a look at Zig"}, {"id": 780906259, "item_id": 48806641, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48806641", "by": "canntstand", "date": "2026-07-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "a full monitoring stack (Grafana + Prometheus + Loki + Grafana Alloy, etc.)", "excerpt": "Hi everyone! I wanted to share a project I\u2019ve been working on called ServeHub-2. It\u2019s designed as an out-of-the-box solution for anyone looking for a ready-to-use, hybrid self-hosted architecture with a complete monitoring and backup system. The project is tailored for Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch Linux. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/canntstand/ServeHub-2 I completely automated the setup via Ansible, Docker conta", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "I built an out-of-the-box self-hosting infrastructure. How can I improve it?"}]}, {"label": "Data source flexibility", "summary": "Works on top of many backends, including VictoriaMetrics, ClickHouse, Postgres and Graphite.", "quotes": [{"id": 790484289, "item_id": 49405268, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49405268", "by": "rtpg", "date": "2026-08-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we also query into it with grafana", "excerpt": "We use victoriametrics, but I believe that's just the collector side of it cuz we also query into it with grafana. Datadog isn't just a collector, but the whole querying UI as well, right?", "context": "", "use_case": "querying metrics", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}, {"id": 746315745, "item_id": 46644734, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644734", "by": "Gazoche", "date": "2026-01-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "redirect the data to my own Postgres+Grafana setup for recording and monitoring", "excerpt": "* A USB KVM that lets me share my keyboard/mouse/webcam between my two computers (work and personal), and switch at the press of a button. * One of those IKEA wall-mounted grate things (SK\u00c5DIS) that you can hang stuff to. IKEA sells hooks for it that turn out to be the perfect size to hold a PS4 controller securely, plus various boxes and mini-shelves that have helped declutter my desk. * A cheap bluetooth-connected ", "context": "", "use_case": "sensor monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are your best purchases under $100?"}, {"id": 733727892, "item_id": 45857993, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45857993", "by": "pahae", "date": "2025-11-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I'm currently implementing a full observability platform based on VictoriaMetrics / Victorialogs + Grafana.", "excerpt": "I wish the big providers would offer some sort of trial period where you can evaluate models in a _realistic_ setting yourself (i.e cli tools or IDE integrations). I wouldn't even mind strict limits -- just give me two hours or so of usage and I'd already be happy. Seriously. My use-case is probably pretty far from the usual tasks: I'm currently implementing a full observability platform based on VictoriaMetrics / Vi", "context": "", "use_case": "observability dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Study identifies weaknesses in how AI systems are evaluated"}]}, {"label": "Home monitoring", "summary": "Used to monitor homelabs, workstations and home sensors.", "quotes": [{"id": 784388656, "item_id": 49024291, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024291", "by": "embedding-shape", "date": "2026-07-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "using things like Grafana+Prometheus to monitor your personal computer/workstation as well. This is what I've done", "excerpt": "I feel like the only responsible thing is to have a home network with at least one persistent device running 24/7 with large storage for local backups of things, and ideally a E2E cloud backup of the same thing. With this, comes the possibility of using things like Grafana+Prometheus to monitor your personal computer/workstation as well. This is what I've done, together with alerts from various things, and since the ", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring workstation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is there a website that tracks excessive writes to SSDs in OS/app betas?"}, {"id": 768154180, "item_id": 48009636, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48009636", "by": "godzillafarts", "date": "2026-05-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Grafana + Prometheus monitoring everything.", "excerpt": "Recently went through a similar kick in the pants with both Apple (photos, videos, etc.) and Google (Nest thermostats). I have been piecemeal migrating various services that my home uses into a self-hosted services on my homelab, following this as a rough (hardware) guideline: https://mini-rack.jeffgeerling.com/ There are self-hosted versions of everything you're asking about. You could conceivably create a relativel", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "home monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is a hands-off, family-friendly, de-Googled \"home lab\" feasible?"}, {"id": 746315745, "item_id": 46644734, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644734", "by": "Gazoche", "date": "2026-01-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "redirect the data to my own Postgres+Grafana setup for recording and monitoring", "excerpt": "* A USB KVM that lets me share my keyboard/mouse/webcam between my two computers (work and personal), and switch at the press of a button. * One of those IKEA wall-mounted grate things (SK\u00c5DIS) that you can hang stuff to. IKEA sells hooks for it that turn out to be the perfect size to hold a PS4 controller securely, plus various boxes and mini-shelves that have helped declutter my desk. * A cheap bluetooth-connected ", "context": "", "use_case": "sensor monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are your best purchases under $100?"}]}, {"label": "Visualization", "summary": "Described as better than alternatives for core data visualization and exploration, with good dashboards.", "quotes": [{"id": 734962609, "item_id": 45935163, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935163", "by": "theteapot", "date": "2025-11-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But Grafana is still way better if you just stay away from anything that isn't the core product", "excerpt": "https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards (Kibana fork) is one. But Grafana is still way better if you just stay away from anything that isn't the core product: data visualization and exploration (explorer and traces).", "context": "", "use_case": "data visualization and exploration", "switched_from": "", "story": "I can't recommend Grafana anymore"}, {"id": 798033569, "item_id": 49877098, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49877098", "by": "bleevht", "date": "2026-09-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I was able to have a really good TrueNAS monitoring dashboard in Grafana.", "excerpt": "I connected my TrueNAS box to Graphite and Grafana. I had both of these running in a Talos Kubernetes cluster. The metrics were sent over correctly, but the imported dashboard I was using from the Grafana community showed no data because it expected older TrueNAS metric paths. So, I got this fixed after remapping the panels. Then, I found another issue. It interpreted an ARC value in bytes as megabytes and displayed ", "context": "", "use_case": "TrueNAS monitoring dashboard", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 781315200, "item_id": 48832200, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48832200", "by": "alexpotato", "date": "2026-07-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I highly recommend this video about it being used at a water treatment plant", "excerpt": "If people love to watch novel use cases of dashboard software like Grafana etc, I highly recommend this video about it being used at a water treatment plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wucMZ9tb1I0", "context": "", "use_case": "dashboards for water treatment plant", "switched_from": "", "story": "Japan's Hayabusa2 probe to conduct flyby of Torifune asteroid"}]}, {"label": "Low cost", "summary": "One team reports years of mostly maintenance-free use for under $100/month instead of Datadog.", "quotes": [{"id": 746096977, "item_id": 46631061, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631061", "by": "physicles", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month.", "excerpt": "I can't get over how expensive these observability platforms are. Last I looked (and looked again just now), if we were to take all our structured logs from all services and send them to Datadog with our current retention policy, it would just about double our current IT spend. Instead, we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month. What am I missing? What'", "context": "", "use_case": "log observability", "switched_from": "Datadog", "story": "I built Vector. Now I'm answering the question your observability vendor won't"}, {"id": 790428832, "item_id": 49401802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "by": "losingthefight", "date": "2026-08-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo.", "excerpt": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo. I use an Alloy sidecar taking in OTEL and scraping logs.feom my Go services and selfhost the stack. Once you need to scale it gets a bit more complicated but it's all still OSS. The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but", "context": "runs OSS stack for personal and consulting jobs", "use_case": "self-hosted observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}, {"id": 765123700, "item_id": 47820231, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47820231", "by": "chickensong", "date": "2026-04-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "maybe some kind of OTel, wide log, ClickHouse, Grafana thing", "excerpt": "Are you asking about other 3rd party solutions, or thinking of DIY? AFAIK, Datadog is still the best/most expensive. Any provider offering AI analysis is just going to add to your cost. > I love putting time into this stuff > like the reason for using Heroku - I have a lot of other stuff I need to focus on You probably need to pick a side here. Building a robust solution with even a fraction of Datadog and Sentry fea", "context": "promotes DIY", "use_case": "DIY observability dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Observability Stack \u2013 AI First?"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Multiple query languages", "summary": "Each data source needs its own query language, which pushed one employer to Datadog.", "quotes": [{"id": 790428832, "item_id": 49401802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "by": "losingthefight", "date": "2026-08-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo.", "excerpt": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo. I use an Alloy sidecar taking in OTEL and scraping logs.feom my Go services and selfhost the stack. Once you need to scale it gets a bit more complicated but it's all still OSS. The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but", "context": "runs OSS stack for personal and consulting jobs", "use_case": "self-hosted observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}]}, {"label": "Scaling complexity", "summary": "Scaling the self-hosted stack gets more complicated.", "quotes": [{"id": 790428832, "item_id": 49401802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "by": "losingthefight", "date": "2026-08-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo.", "excerpt": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo. I use an Alloy sidecar taking in OTEL and scraping logs.feom my Go services and selfhost the stack. Once you need to scale it gets a bit more complicated but it's all still OSS. The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but", "context": "runs OSS stack for personal and consulting jobs", "use_case": "self-hosted observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}]}, {"label": "Heavy for small devices", "summary": "A Prometheus/Grafana setup was too heavy for small devices.", "quotes": [{"id": 766809106, "item_id": 47925569, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47925569", "by": "matebajusz", "date": "2026-04-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana) was too heavy for small devices.", "excerpt": "I've been hosting one of my side projects on AWS. The project actually did quite well for a while, generating a few thousand euros per month. Then COVID hit, regulations changed, and the problem it solved basically disappeared overnight. Revenue dropped to zero, the startup credits I received held out for quite some time, after that I kept the project running, paying out of pocket, thinking maybe it would recover. Th", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Remote Access for Home Assistant Without Nabu Casa"}]}, {"label": "Non-core products", "summary": "One commenter advises staying away from anything outside the core visualization product.", "quotes": [{"id": 734962609, "item_id": 45935163, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935163", "by": "theteapot", "date": "2025-11-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But Grafana is still way better if you just stay away from anything that isn't the core product", "excerpt": "https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards (Kibana fork) is one. But Grafana is still way better if you just stay away from anything that isn't the core product: data visualization and exploration (explorer and traces).", "context": "", "use_case": "data visualization and exploration", "switched_from": "", "story": "I can't recommend Grafana anymore"}]}, {"label": "Business model", "summary": "A commenter claims free plugins are made hard to manage to push users to pay.", "quotes": [{"id": 800089040, "item_id": 50005565, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50005565", "by": "mingus88", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "make the free plugin a nightmare to manage to coax folk into paying for it", "excerpt": "And then the authors realize this and make the free plugin a nightmare to manage to coax folk into paying for it That is the entire business model of grafana", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: GitHub refuses to remove cracked copies of my software after a month"}]}, {"label": "Community dashboards", "summary": "An imported community dashboard showed no data and wrong units until panels were remapped.", "quotes": [{"id": 798033569, "item_id": 49877098, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49877098", "by": "bleevht", "date": "2026-09-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I was able to have a really good TrueNAS monitoring dashboard in Grafana.", "excerpt": "I connected my TrueNAS box to Graphite and Grafana. I had both of these running in a Talos Kubernetes cluster. The metrics were sent over correctly, but the imported dashboard I was using from the Grafana community showed no data because it expected older TrueNAS metric paths. So, I got this fixed after remapping the panels. Then, I found another issue. It interpreted an ARC value in bytes as megabytes and displayed ", "context": "", "use_case": "TrueNAS monitoring dashboard", "switched_from": "", "story": null}]}], "who": [{"by": "bengalister", "context": "homelab self-hoster, works with Kubernetes", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50114968", "date": "2026-10-16"}, {"by": "justsomehuman", "context": "self-hosts on a Hetzner CAX31", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013881", "date": "2026-10-08"}, {"by": "jabrotapu", "context": "freelancer building on-prem GPU clusters", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49661006", "date": "2026-09-11"}, {"by": "losingthefight", "context": "runs OSS stack for personal and consulting jobs", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "date": "2026-08-22"}, {"by": "shepherdjerred", "context": "homelab user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431064", "date": "2026-06-06"}, {"by": "godzillafarts", "context": "homelab user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48009636", "date": "2026-05-04"}, {"by": "chickensong", "context": "promotes DIY", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47820231", "date": "2026-04-18"}, {"by": "LANcaster", "context": "Linux sysadmin/DevOps with 20+ years experience", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356043", "date": "2026-03-12"}], "tags": ["self-hostable", "for homelabs", "for Kubernetes users", "Datadog alternative", "for workstation monitoring"], "use_cases": ["monitoring", "monitoring dashboards", "dashboards", "truenas monitoring dashboard", "cluster dashboards", "querying metrics"], "compared": [{"slug": "prometheus", "name": "Prometheus", "co": 14, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "datadog", "name": "Datadog", "co": 5, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "loki", "name": "Loki", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "immich", "name": "Immich", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "victoriametrics", "name": "VictoriaMetrics", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "clickhouse", "name": "ClickHouse", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "home-assistant", "name": "Home Assistant", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude", "name": "Claude", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 769121825, "item_id": 48070114, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070114", "by": "cjcjameson", "date": "2026-05-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Observability stack \u2014 Prometheus, Grafana, dashboards, alerting, and on-call workflows", "excerpt": "Parabola | Site Reliability Engineer | San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) | Full-time Parabola is a no-code data workflow automation tool that helps operations teams move, transform, and automate their data without writing code. LLMs are a core part of our product \u2014 we use them to help users build and reason about their workflows \u2014 and they're increasingly part of how we run infrastructure too. We're a small, product-focused", "context": "hiring for Parabola", "use_case": "dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49985548", "title": "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49391553", "title": "OTel isn\u2019t going well", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45934940", "title": "I can't recommend Grafana anymore", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50109715", "title": "What I self-host", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49982498", "title": "Tell HN: GitHub refuses to remove cracked copies of my software after a month", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49877097", "title": "item 49877097", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 2}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 2, "warn": 1}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 2}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 2}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 3}, "2026-10": {"warn": 1, "neutral": 3}}, "quotes": [{"id": 801839495, "item_id": 50114968, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50114968", "by": "bengalister", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "grafana/prometheus", "excerpt": "I also self host some services: keycloak, forgejo, home assistant, immich, grafana/prometheus, jellyfin, pureftp (to store my surveillance cameras videos), and a vibecoded financial app, and soon hermes agent on a 2023 laptop. I chose to run most of them on Kubernetes since I am used to work with it. I use: - ha-proxy running on the host and istio running inside the cluster for the sni based ingress routing - cert-ma", "context": "homelab self-hoster, works with Kubernetes", "use_case": "monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "What I self-host"}, {"id": 800409499, "item_id": 50025593, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50025593", "by": "MayeulC", "date": "2026-10-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Prometheus, grafana & monitorix: monitoring", "excerpt": "Well, I have a VPS, plus multiple physical servers in different locations (parents, etc). The VPS is useful for: - sending e-mails (hard to improve your reputation on residential IPs and get a reverse DNS record) - Unifi controller, though I appreciate Unifi less and less. - Uptime monitoring / status page - I think I'll move my headscale node there, since it has the highest availability -- Internet was out for a wee", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"}, {"id": 800222105, "item_id": 50013881, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013881", "by": "justsomehuman", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I run the following services / apps.", "excerpt": "Not quite as cheap as $5 but I've been running at Hetzner CAX31 for a couple of years now and I run the following services / apps. Actual Budget - https://github.com/actualbudget/actual AirTrail - https://github.com/johanohly/AirTrail Beszel - https://github.com/henrygd/beszel Coder - https://github.com/coder/coder Crowdsec - https://github.com/crowdsecurity/crowdsec Dawarich - https://github.com/Freika/dawarich Dozz", "context": "self-hosts on a Hetzner CAX31", "use_case": "dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?"}, {"id": 800089040, "item_id": 50005565, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50005565", "by": "mingus88", "date": "2026-10-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "make the free plugin a nightmare to manage to coax folk into paying for it", "excerpt": "And then the authors realize this and make the free plugin a nightmare to manage to coax folk into paying for it That is the entire business model of grafana", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tell HN: GitHub refuses to remove cracked copies of my software after a month"}, {"id": 798033569, "item_id": 49877098, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49877098", "by": "bleevht", "date": "2026-09-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I was able to have a really good TrueNAS monitoring dashboard in Grafana.", "excerpt": "I connected my TrueNAS box to Graphite and Grafana. I had both of these running in a Talos Kubernetes cluster. The metrics were sent over correctly, but the imported dashboard I was using from the Grafana community showed no data because it expected older TrueNAS metric paths. So, I got this fixed after remapping the panels. Then, I found another issue. It interpreted an ARC value in bytes as megabytes and displayed ", "context": "", "use_case": "TrueNAS monitoring dashboard", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 794592689, "item_id": 49662043, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662043", "by": "reenorap", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "installed Prometheus and Grafana and built grafana dashboards all using AI", "excerpt": "I feel the opposite of sad, I am very very excited. I love programming and I love technology, but the stuff I'm doing now is beyond what I could not do on my own, and now I'm spending a few hours building complete end-to-end stuff. This is the golden age for builders. I created a fully working house simulator, I made a math test creator for my kids, I fixed up some other side projects that I had and added observabili", "context": "", "use_case": "dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Feeling Sad about AI"}, {"id": 794576101, "item_id": 49661006, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49661006", "by": "jabrotapu", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Prometheus and Grafana", "excerpt": "SEEKING WORK | India, remote | Part-time | Overlap with US, UK, EU hours I build on-prem GPU clusters and private AI apps that run entirely on the client's own hardware, so their data never leaves the building. About 10 years full-stack, the last few on GPU infrastructure. Currently running a live production cluster: 700-800 users sharing a small physical GPU pool. GPU-backed JupyterHub, single sign-on, per-user quot", "context": "freelancer building on-prem GPU clusters", "use_case": "cluster dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (September 2026)"}, {"id": 790484289, "item_id": 49405268, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49405268", "by": "rtpg", "date": "2026-08-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we also query into it with grafana", "excerpt": "We use victoriametrics, but I believe that's just the collector side of it cuz we also query into it with grafana. Datadog isn't just a collector, but the whole querying UI as well, right?", "context": "", "use_case": "querying metrics", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}, {"id": 790428832, "item_id": 49401802, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401802", "by": "losingthefight", "date": "2026-08-22", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo.", "excerpt": "I run OSS Grafana with Loki, Prometheus, and Tempo. I use an Alloy sidecar taking in OTEL and scraping logs.feom my Go services and selfhost the stack. Once you need to scale it gets a bit more complicated but it's all still OSS. The biggest challenge I have is that each data source needs it's own query language, which DD and the like don't. That's why at my day job they went with DD despite the costs. Still OTEL but", "context": "runs OSS stack for personal and consulting jobs", "use_case": "self-hosted observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "OTel isn\u2019t going well"}, {"id": 784388656, "item_id": 49024291, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49024291", "by": "embedding-shape", "date": "2026-07-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "using things like Grafana+Prometheus to monitor your personal computer/workstation as well. This is what I've done", "excerpt": "I feel like the only responsible thing is to have a home network with at least one persistent device running 24/7 with large storage for local backups of things, and ideally a E2E cloud backup of the same thing. With this, comes the possibility of using things like Grafana+Prometheus to monitor your personal computer/workstation as well. This is what I've done, together with alerts from various things, and since the ", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring workstation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is there a website that tracks excessive writes to SSDs in OS/app betas?"}, {"id": 781315200, "item_id": 48832200, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48832200", "by": "alexpotato", "date": "2026-07-08", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I highly recommend this video about it being used at a water treatment plant", "excerpt": "If people love to watch novel use cases of dashboard software like Grafana etc, I highly recommend this video about it being used at a water treatment plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wucMZ9tb1I0", "context": "", "use_case": "dashboards for water treatment plant", "switched_from": "", "story": "Japan's Hayabusa2 probe to conduct flyby of Torifune asteroid"}, {"id": 780906259, "item_id": 48806641, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48806641", "by": "canntstand", "date": "2026-07-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "a full monitoring stack (Grafana + Prometheus + Loki + Grafana Alloy, etc.)", "excerpt": "Hi everyone! I wanted to share a project I\u2019ve been working on called ServeHub-2. It\u2019s designed as an out-of-the-box solution for anyone looking for a ready-to-use, hybrid self-hosted architecture with a complete monitoring and backup system. The project is tailored for Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch Linux. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/canntstand/ServeHub-2 I completely automated the setup via Ansible, Docker conta", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "I built an out-of-the-box self-hosting infrastructure. How can I improve it?"}, {"id": 775269590, "item_id": 48454349, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48454349", "by": "FireBeyond", "date": "2026-06-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "my own VictoriaMetrics / Grafana set up on Kubernetes", "excerpt": "Workflow: Built a meeting-intelligence pipeline that turns raw, error-prone transcripts into a structured, queryable knowledge base. Meetings get auto-transcribed by Krisp, whose speech recognition mangles the things I most need correct, like colleague names, customer names, internal product and architecture terms. I hand each transcript to Claude alongside a hand-built context document, and it works a fixed routine:", "context": "", "use_case": "weather dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI"}, {"id": 774897026, "item_id": 48431064, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48431064", "by": "shepherdjerred", "date": "2026-06-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Give Claude/Codex access to observability (Grafana, Prometheus, Tempo, PagerDuty)", "excerpt": "This mirrors exactly what I have been doing. - Give Claude/Codex a way to verify its own work (browser, smoke tests, e2e tests, high-fidelity local environment) - Keep all context (issue tracking, docs, ideas, plans, worklogs) in-repo (https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/packages/docs) - Give Claude/Codex access to observability (Grafana, Prometheus, Tempo, PagerDuty) - Have Claude/Codex follow good ", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "agent observability", "switched_from": "", "story": "Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world"}, {"id": 768154180, "item_id": 48009636, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48009636", "by": "godzillafarts", "date": "2026-05-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Grafana + Prometheus monitoring everything.", "excerpt": "Recently went through a similar kick in the pants with both Apple (photos, videos, etc.) and Google (Nest thermostats). I have been piecemeal migrating various services that my home uses into a self-hosted services on my homelab, following this as a rough (hardware) guideline: https://mini-rack.jeffgeerling.com/ There are self-hosted versions of everything you're asking about. You could conceivably create a relativel", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "home monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Is a hands-off, family-friendly, de-Googled \"home lab\" feasible?"}, {"id": 767336051, "item_id": 47958503, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958503", "by": "faangguyindia", "date": "2026-04-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "just using simple scripts + graphana + prometheus + Loki and for alloy/nodeexporter", "excerpt": "These days I just use a few languages: 1. Go, when I first saw code I wrote almost a decade ago still compiles and runs in Go, I decided to use Go for everything. There were some initial troubles when I started using it a decade ago, but now it's painless. 2. Haskell, I use it for DSL and state machines. 3. Bash for all deployment scripts and everything. 4. TypeScript, well for the frontend. Lately, I\u2019ve been using G", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring and alerts", "switched_from": "", "story": "Functional Programmers need to take a look at Zig"}, {"id": 766809106, "item_id": 47925569, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47925569", "by": "matebajusz", "date": "2026-04-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana) was too heavy for small devices.", "excerpt": "I've been hosting one of my side projects on AWS. The project actually did quite well for a while, generating a few thousand euros per month. Then COVID hit, regulations changed, and the problem it solved basically disappeared overnight. Revenue dropped to zero, the startup credits I received held out for quite some time, after that I kept the project running, paying out of pocket, thinking maybe it would recover. Th", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Remote Access for Home Assistant Without Nabu Casa"}, {"id": 765123700, "item_id": 47820231, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47820231", "by": "chickensong", "date": "2026-04-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "maybe some kind of OTel, wide log, ClickHouse, Grafana thing", "excerpt": "Are you asking about other 3rd party solutions, or thinking of DIY? AFAIK, Datadog is still the best/most expensive. Any provider offering AI analysis is just going to add to your cost. > I love putting time into this stuff > like the reason for using Heroku - I have a lot of other stuff I need to focus on You probably need to pick a side here. Building a robust solution with even a fraction of Datadog and Sentry fea", "context": "promotes DIY", "use_case": "DIY observability dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Observability Stack \u2013 AI First?"}, {"id": 757696689, "item_id": 47356043, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356043", "by": "LANcaster", "date": "2026-03-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use monitoring and automation tools like Zabbix, Grafana, Ansible, and Terraform", "excerpt": "Working with Linux for more than 20 years | SysOps and DevOps Expert | Secure and Versatile Infrastructure Design Location: Lisbon, Portugal Remote: Yes, I work remotely since 2005 Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, Proxmox, Ansible, Terraform, Zabbix, Grafana, Prometheus, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and much, much more LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krzysztofkotkowicz/ Resume/CV: https:/", "context": "Linux sysadmin/DevOps with 20+ years experience", "use_case": "monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)"}, {"id": 751874049, "item_id": 46992128, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46992128", "by": "XCSme", "date": "2026-02-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Was messing around with Grafana and other stuff", "excerpt": "Yeah, SaaS tools start feeling bloated fast. I switched to self-hosting analytics so I could track user behavior properly without paying per seat. Was messing around with Grafana and other stuff, but for session replays and metrics I built UXWizz. Gives me everything self-hosted and avoids those crazy per-user bills [0]. [0] https://www.uxwizz.com", "context": "", "use_case": "analytics", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI Is Killing B2B SaaS"}, {"id": 746315745, "item_id": 46644734, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46644734", "by": "Gazoche", "date": "2026-01-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "redirect the data to my own Postgres+Grafana setup for recording and monitoring", "excerpt": "* A USB KVM that lets me share my keyboard/mouse/webcam between my two computers (work and personal), and switch at the press of a button. * One of those IKEA wall-mounted grate things (SK\u00c5DIS) that you can hang stuff to. IKEA sells hooks for it that turn out to be the perfect size to hold a PS4 controller securely, plus various boxes and mini-shelves that have helped declutter my desk. * A cheap bluetooth-connected ", "context": "", "use_case": "sensor monitoring", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are your best purchases under $100?"}, {"id": 746096977, "item_id": 46631061, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631061", "by": "physicles", "date": "2026-01-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month.", "excerpt": "I can't get over how expensive these observability platforms are. Last I looked (and looked again just now), if we were to take all our structured logs from all services and send them to Datadog with our current retention policy, it would just about double our current IT spend. Instead, we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month. What am I missing? What'", "context": "", "use_case": "log observability", "switched_from": "Datadog", "story": "I built Vector. Now I'm answering the question your observability vendor won't"}, {"id": 734968064, "item_id": 45935504, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935504", "by": "didierbreedt", "date": "2025-11-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I have found Grafana to be a decent product", "excerpt": "I have found Grafana to be a decent product, but Prom needs a better horizontally scalable solution. We use Vector and Clickhouse for logging and works really well.", "context": "", "use_case": "monitoring dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "I can't recommend Grafana anymore"}, {"id": 734962609, "item_id": 45935163, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45935163", "by": "theteapot", "date": "2025-11-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "But Grafana is still way better if you just stay away from anything that isn't the core product", "excerpt": "https://github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch-Dashboards (Kibana fork) is one. But Grafana is still way better if you just stay away from anything that isn't the core product: data visualization and exploration (explorer and traces).", "context": "", "use_case": "data visualization and exploration", "switched_from": "", "story": "I can't recommend Grafana anymore"}, {"id": 733727892, "item_id": 45857993, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45857993", "by": "pahae", "date": "2025-11-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I'm currently implementing a full observability platform based on VictoriaMetrics / Victorialogs + Grafana.", "excerpt": "I wish the big providers would offer some sort of trial period where you can evaluate models in a _realistic_ setting yourself (i.e cli tools or IDE integrations). I wouldn't even mind strict limits -- just give me two hours or so of usage and I'd already be happy. Seriously. My use-case is probably pretty far from the usual tasks: I'm currently implementing a full observability platform based on VictoriaMetrics / Vi", "context": "", "use_case": "observability dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Study identifies weaknesses in how AI systems are evaluated"}]}