Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform that transforms metrics, logs, and traces from multiple data sources into interactive dashboards and graphs. Originally created by Torkel Ödegaard in 2013, Grafana has become the de facto standard for observability visualization, supporting over 150 data source integrations including Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and cloud provider services. Its strength lies in unified visualization: one dashboard can seamlessly combine metrics from Prometheus, logs from Loki, traces from Tempo, and cloud metrics from AWS CloudWatch—offering a complete observability picture without switching tools.