04 / Software▸Review▸Infra
Full review — three-week desk testPrometheus, Loki, OpenTelemetry — Grafana remains the visualization front door. OSS is free; Cloud is the paid path. We rebuilt our homelab overview on Grafana 12 and lived in the alerts for three weeks.
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Metrics without a dashboard are just anxiety with timestamps. Grafana is still the default glass pane: point it at Prometheus, Loki, or a dozen other sources, and suddenly the lab has a face.
We rebuilt our homelab overview on Grafana 12 — node exporters, container metrics, UPS, and a few synthetic probes — then let unified alerting page us for disk and certificate expiry for three weeks.
Ran Grafana OSS in Compose beside Prometheus and Loki; imported community dashboards; built one custom overview; configured alert rules to Discord/email.
services: grafana: image: grafana/grafana:12.1.0 ports: ["3000:3000"] volumes: - grafana-data:/var/lib/grafana environment: GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD: "change-me"Data source gravity. If it emits metrics or logs, Grafana probably speaks it. Explore makes ad-hoc questions cheap.
Dashboard ecosystem. Community JSON gets you 80% there on day one; customize the rest.
OSS viability. You can run a serious stack without Grafana Cloud — Cloud is convenience and scale, not a forced gate for basics.
PullGrafana doesn't have to be beautiful. It has to be honest when the disk is lying to you.
| Annoyance | Severity | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Dashboard clutter / abandoned imports | Medium | Curate ruthlessly |
| Alerting UX still fiddly at times | Medium | Version-to-version improvements help |
| Plugin licensing mixed (OSS vs enterprise) | Medium | Read before depending |
| Easy to under-secure the UI | High | Auth + network policy |
| If you… | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Run Prometheus/Loki already | Install Grafana today |
| Want SaaS without ops | Grafana Cloud free tier → paid |
| Only need one host's graphs | Netdata/Glances may be lighter |
| Need full APM product suite | Evaluate Grafana Stack vs Datadog et al. |
Score bars map to lived questions: features you actually used, day-to-day snappiness, threat-model honesty, price vs capability, ecosystem coverage, and how long until the tool felt invisible.
Grafana 12 is still the first pane we open after a deploy. The aesthetics can wait; the red line on disk space cannot.
Honesty requires alternatives. Depending on how your brain is shaped, one of these may be the right call instead.
The terminal UI that makes kubectl feel like a video game — once you live here, you don't go back.
A GUI for Docker that homelabbers actually keep installed — Business Edition is optional until SSO isn't.