Deploying the Grafana stack

Grafana Labs fully embraces its history as an open source software provider. The LGTM stack, alongside most other components, is open source. There are a few value-added components that are offered as part of an enterprise subscription.

As a SaaS offering, Grafana Labs provides access to storage for Loki, Mimir, and Tempo, alongside Grafana’s 100+ integrations for external data sources. As a SaaS customer, you also gain ready access to a huge range of other tools you may use and can present them in a consolidated manner, in a single pane of glass. The SaaS offering allows organizations to leverage a full-featured observability platform without the operational overhead of running the platform and obtaining service level agreements for the operation of the platform.

As well as managing the platform for you, you can run Grafana on your organization’s infrastructure. Grafana offers its software packaged in several formats for Linux and Windows deployments, as well as offering containerized versions. Grafana also offers Helm and Tanka configuration wrappers for each of their tools. This book will mainly concentrate on the SaaS offering because it is easy to get started with the free tier. We will explore some areas where a local installation can assist in Chapters 11 and 14, which cover architecting and supporting DevOps processes respectively.