Grafana: Self-Hosted Observability and Dashboards

Grafana is the industry-standard open-source platform for monitoring and observability. With over 72,000 GitHub stars, it powers dashboards at organizations of every size — from hobbyist home labs to Netflix and NASA. Grafana connects to virtually any data source (Prometheus, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch, and 150+ more) and transforms raw metrics into rich, interactive visualizations.

Self-hosting Grafana gives you a private observability platform with full control over your dashboards, data sources, and alerting rules.

Key Features

• 150+ built-in data source plugins including Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, MySQL, and cloud providers
• Rich visualization library with graphs, gauges, heatmaps, tables, and geomaps
• Powerful query editor with support for PromQL, SQL, LogQL, and custom query languages
• Unified alerting system with multi-channel notifications (Slack, PagerDuty, email, webhooks)
• Template variables and dynamic dashboards for filtering data across panels
• Dashboard provisioning via YAML for infrastructure-as-code workflows
• Annotation support for marking deployments, incidents, and events on graphs
• Role-based access control with organizations, teams, and folder permissions

Why Self-Host Grafana?

Complete data sovereignty. Your monitoring data often reveals more about your infrastructure than you realize — traffic patterns, capacity limits, user activity, and system architecture. Self-hosting Grafana keeps all dashboard data, queries, and visualizations on your own infrastructure. No third-party vendor sees your operational metrics.

No user or dashboard limits. Grafana Cloud's free tier limits dashboards, users, and data retention. Self-hosted Grafana has no artificial limits — create unlimited dashboards, add unlimited users, and retain data as long as your storage allows.

Custom plugins and integrations. Self-hosting lets you install any community plugin, build custom data source connectors, and modify Grafana's behavior. Integrate with internal APIs, proprietary databases, or niche monitoring systems that cloud offerings don't support.

Cost control at scale. Grafana Cloud pricing scales with metrics ingestion volume and active users. For organizations with hundreds of thousands of metrics or large teams, self-hosting on a fixed-cost VPS is dramatically cheaper than cloud pricing.

System Requirements

Resource	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	1 vCPU	2 vCPUs
RAM	1 GB	4 GB
Storage	10 GB SSD	20 GB SSD
OS	Ubuntu 22.04+	Ubuntu 24.04

Grafana itself is lightweight. Resource usage depends on the number of concurrent dashboard viewers and query complexity. The data sources (Prometheus, InfluxDB, etc.) running alongside Grafana typically need more resources than Grafana itself.

Getting Started

Deploy Grafana on your VPS using Docker Compose through Dokploy. Our guide covers persistent storage, data source configuration, SSL, and connecting to Prometheus or other backends.

Deploy Grafana with Dokploy →

Alternatives

• Netdata — Real-time monitoring with zero-configuration auto-discovery and built-in dashboards
• Metabase — Business intelligence platform for querying databases and building dashboards
• Apache Superset — Data exploration and visualization platform for analytics teams
• Chronograf — Time-series data visualization from the InfluxDB ecosystem

FAQ

What data sources does Grafana support? Grafana connects to 150+ data sources including Prometheus, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Loki, Tempo, Jaeger, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Monitoring, and many more via community plugins.

Is Grafana free for self-hosting? Yes. Grafana OSS (open-source) is fully free under the AGPL-3.0 license. It includes dashboards, alerting, data source plugins, and all core features. Grafana Enterprise adds features like enhanced RBAC, reporting, and enterprise plugins — but most users find the OSS version sufficient.

How do I back up Grafana dashboards? Grafana stores dashboards in a SQLite or PostgreSQL database. Back up the database file or use Grafana's HTTP API to export dashboards as JSON. For infrastructure-as-code setups, provision dashboards from YAML files stored in version control.

Can Grafana handle real-time data? Yes. Grafana supports streaming data sources and auto-refreshing panels. Set refresh intervals as low as 5 seconds for near-real-time dashboards. Combined with Prometheus or InfluxDB, you get sub-second metric resolution visualized in real time.

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App data sourced from selfh.st open-source directory.