AGPL licensed
Why self-host Grafana rather than run it in the cloud
Grafana queries data where it already lives and presents it in one place. Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL and MySQL are all first-class sources. A single panel can combine them. Alert rules sit next to the dashboards and route to Slack, PagerDuty or email when a threshold is crossed.
The hosted tier is priced by active series and by how long the data is kept, so the bill grows with the estate and grows again each time you extend retention. Self-hosting moves that decision onto your own disk. You set the retention window, the scrape interval and the number of dashboards, while the cost of the server stays the same throughout. Grafana itself is AGPL licensed.