Products · Product
Grafana
Raised as a usability problem by 62 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2015–2026), in 42 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
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Every issue, all time, most people first
Dashboard slows to a crawl as more graphs are addedUnreviewed
20152026- Default dashboards are very slow when navigating simple metrics2023-05-16
- Dashboard slows to a crawl as more graphs are added2020-07-21
- UI becomes very slow once enough graphs are added2018-07-20
Alerts became harder to use after the version 8 redesignUnreviewed
20152026- Alerts became harder to use after the version 8 redesign2024-09-19
- Hard to know which alert rules are defined where across GUIs2022-03-21
- Configuring many identical systems' alerts by clicking is a nightmare with no templating2022-02-02
Exploring data in the Grafana UI is very awkward for exploratory usersUnreviewed
20152026- Newer InfluxDB versions lost the query builder autocomplete UI in Grafana2023-10-01
- Grafana is too bloated and poorly documented to add to local development stacks2023-09-19
- Exploring data in the Grafana UI is incredibly annoying for exploratory users2023-06-27
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Self-hosting was hard, undocumented for production, and the UX was abrasive2026-05-13
- Too many node exporter metrics with no naming convention, making dashboards hard to build2026-04-06
- Constant UI moves, component swaps, and glitches make dashboards hard to keep using2025-11-15
- Exploring a data hypothesis on the fly is harder and more frustrating than in Datadog2025-11-07
- Simple actions take 14 clicks in Grafana; pasted graphs with missing variables come out empty2025-11-07
- Each keystroke runs a search and gets billed, so users must change how they type2025-08-02
- Alerting now requires writing queries and produces unfilterable metadata instead of simple thresholds2025-07-13
- Batch-querying logs in Explore is awkward for simply reading application logs2025-06-04
- Aggregate function syntax is unintuitive and hard to use2025-03-20
- Needs many data sources, one per team view, to be user friendly2025-03-19
- Hard to configure and use correctly without hitting usage limit errors2025-03-19
- The UI/UX is non-intuitive to use2025-03-19
- Setup is a convoluted upsell maze instead of a direct path to graphs and logs2025-01-11
- Configuring things through the settings UI is very painful and tedious2024-12-31
- Interface is cluttered and basic functions are hard to figure out2024-12-31
- Dashboards have many nested scrollbars, so users pick the wrong one to scroll2024-11-29
- Alerts became harder to use after the version 8 redesign2024-09-19
- Dashboards made by others are hard to interpret, with confusing gauges and graph options2024-05-26
- Grafana UI struggles to render logs the way users want, unlike Kibana2024-05-25
- Hard to find or load traces; search is quirky with a steep learning curve2024-04-09
- Queries often time out, forcing manual filtering or narrower time ranges2024-04-09
- Label-selection interface is painful, so user prefers typing LogQL directly2024-04-09
- Cannot easily view one process's full logs start to finish; clunky for this use case2024-04-09
- Newer InfluxDB versions lost the query builder autocomplete UI in Grafana2023-10-01
- Grafana is too bloated and poorly documented to add to local development stacks2023-09-19
- Exploring data in the Grafana UI is incredibly annoying for exploratory users2023-06-27
- Commit change summary is near unusable, cluttered with auto-generated garbage2023-06-11
- Log viewing interface is hard to use, so it's better to avoid it for logs2023-06-08
- Hard to follow documentation for configuring Grafana via YAML2023-06-07
- Setting up and configuring it is a slog, so the user never reconfigured it2023-06-07
- Couldn't find any screenshots of the UI on the site2023-06-07
- Default dashboards are very slow when navigating simple metrics2023-05-16
- Docs are out of touch and lack GRPC TLS client settings present in source2023-04-28
- Too many poorly integrated tools; user doesn't know where to start2022-11-02
- Can't copy a full date range between dashboards; must re-enter it each time2022-10-07
- Config is verbose and hard to work out without already knowing it2022-09-29
- Adding and editing variables is hard to find and inconsistently located across the UI2022-05-15
- Connecting the on-premise Grafana agent is hard unless using their easy-button deployment2022-03-30
- Download button is hard to find; page funnels visitors toward paid signup2022-03-30
- Hard to know which alert rules are defined where across GUIs2022-03-21
- Selecting a different variable value in the dropdown closes the menu without updating the variable2022-02-06
- Mouse wheel scrolling gets captured by small graph scrollareas, so the page stops scrolling2022-02-06
- Configuring many identical systems' alerts by clicking is a nightmare with no templating2022-02-02
- Swagger docs unreliable; posting an exported alert JSON back fails, costing a day of work2022-02-02
- Couldn't replicate existing queries after updates; user got lost and reverted2021-06-09
- Can't find how to revert two-axis charts to separate axes; reordering and sorting columns is hard2021-06-08
- Actual package download is hidden, with users redirected to paid cloud or software versions2021-04-21
- Nearly unusable without a mouse; keyboard navigation fails for chart configuration2020-12-16
- UX papercuts, slowdowns, and silent breakage make dashboard editing scary2020-10-28
- Scroll jumps while editing multiple queries; series override settings buried, slow to revisit2020-10-28