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Grafana
Grafana and the LGTM stack are the composable route to observability. What DIY flexibility costs to operate, and how Tsuga compares as an alternative.
Definition
Grafana is the open source standard for dashboards, and Grafana Labs builds an observability stack around it: Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics, with Grafana Cloud as the managed offering.
What it means in observability
Grafana dashboards are close to universal, and the composable stack appeals to teams that want open source building blocks they control. It is the DIY end of the market: maximum flexibility, assembled from parts.
How it works in practice
Each signal runs on its own backend, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, or third party data sources, unified at the dashboard layer, where Grafana's plugin model can query almost anything. Self managed deployments run the components on your infrastructure, while Grafana Cloud meters usage per signal, including active metric series.
Where it gets hard
Composability has a payroll: running and upgrading three or four storage systems is real platform engineering, and correlation across separately operated backends leans on discipline and consistent labels. In Grafana Cloud, active series pricing puts cardinality management back on the engineering agenda. Great dashboards sit on top of whichever operational model you choose underneath.
Where Tsuga fits
Tsuga offers the coherence the stack approach asks you to assemble: one OpenTelemetry native platform for all three signals, correlated by default, running inside your own cloud account at a flat per GB price, with no component stack to operate.
Related terms
- MetricA metric is a named numeric measurement tracked over time, request counts, memory usage, response latency, carrying a type, a unit, and attributes that slice it into series.
- ObservabilityObservability is the ability to understand what is happening inside a system from the data it emits: its logs, metrics, and traces.
- Observability pipelineAn observability pipeline is the layer that moves telemetry from where it is produced to where it is stored, transforming it along the way: parsing, enriching, redacting, filtering, sampling, and routing to one or more destinations.
- OpenTelemetryOpenTelemetry is an open source framework for generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry: the logs, metrics, and traces that describe how software behaves in production.