Not sure what's an alternative for Grafana in the open source world in terms of building dashboards for o11y? I'm not aware of one and Grafana is used very extensively in my company...
I mentioned it in another reply, but https://perses.dev/ is probably the most promising alternative.
Besides that, if you're feeling masochistic you could use Prometheus' console templates or VictoriaMetrics' built-in dashboards.
Though these are all obviously nowhere near as feature rich and capable as Grafana and would only be able to display metrics for the single Prom/VM node they're running on. Might enough for some users.
How come I’ve never heard of Perses yet? A really Open Source, standardising Grafana clone to go alongside Prometheus for self-hosted deployments sounds just perfect!
from cursory reading of the article I don’t see that author’s problems are specifically with Grafana in its best use case (metrics), but with other products from Grafana company, for which are a lot of alternatives.
Grafana dashboards itself (paired with VictoriaMetrics and occasionally Clickhouse) is one of the most pleasant web apps IMO. Especially when you don’t try to push the constraints of its display model, which are sometimes annoying but understandable.
I remember that alternative, free/FOSS products existed before Grafana (c2015) but many died, Grafana was everywhere. Now I also cannot find the old-alts. Vague memories of RRD and Nagios...
Munin was what we used for a while, along with a smattering of smokeping.
We're using a combination of Zabbix (alerting) and local Grafana/Prometheus/Loki (observability) at this point, but I've been worried about when Grafana will rug-pull for a while now. Hopefully enough people using their cloud offering sates their appetite and they leave the people running locally alone.
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).
I use Signoz for my private purposes, it's not a 100% match, but you can do Prometheus metrics, logs analysis, dashboards, alerts, OTEL spans so depending on your usecase it can be enough
we're opentelemetry-native and apart from many out of box charts for APM, infra monitoring, and logs, you can also build customized dashboards with lots of visualization option.
