Grafana
Open-source dashboards and alerting over Prometheus, Loki, Tempo and dozens of other sources.
why this verdict
Keep paying — Google has not replaced it
Google's version overlaps, but does not finish the data & BI job, so this one still earns its $19/mo.
- A named launch, not a vibe named, unlinked
- Gemini generating dashboards and PromQL from a description on request. Google, March 25, 2025 — no announcement link recorded yet.
- How much of the job it covers not the job editorial call
- Parts of it. The job still needs the tool to get finished.
- Is there a free way to do it? yes
- 3 of 3 listed replacements have a usable free tier: Perses, Metabase and Datadog.
- What the call is worth $228/yr
- $19/mo at the entry paid tier — $228 a year per seat.
- Threatened by
- Since
- March 25, 2025
- List price
- $19/mo
- Per year
- $228
The backstory
Grafana visualises metrics, logs and traces from almost any backend and is the default dashboard layer in self-hosted observability. Gemini can write PromQL and generate a panel definition, which takes away some of the fiddly authoring work. That mostly makes Grafana easier to adopt. The moat is the plugin ecosystem, the alerting engine and the fact that the dashboards already exist and are wired to on-call, which no chat interface displaces.
Escape hatches
CNCF dashboard project with GitOps-friendly definitions
perses.dev open_in_newOpen-source BI aimed at business questions over databases
metabase.com open_in_newManaged dashboards bundled with agents and integrations
datadoghq.com open_in_new3 of 3 replacements have a usable free tier.