Pick your
tools.
You don't need everything. You need the right thing.
One stack,
four parts.
Most teams land on the same shape: a dashboard, a metrics store, a log store, and a trace store.
Each part does one job well.
Grafana
The dashboard everything else plugs into. Query any source, draw any chart, alert on any threshold.
If you only adopt one tool, make it this one.
Prometheus
Scrapes numbers from your services on a schedule. Stores them. Answers "how much, how fast?"
The de-facto standard. Learn its query language once.
Loki
Logs, but cheap. Indexes labels, not the text. Search by what you tagged, not by grepping everything.
Pairs with Grafana like they were built together. They were.
Tempo
Stores traces without sampling everything away. Follow one request across every service.
The missing piece when "which hop?" is the question.
OpenTelemetry
One library, one standard. Emit metrics, logs, and traces once — send them anywhere.
Instrument once. Switch backends later without rewriting.
Start small.
Grafana first. Add Prometheus when you need numbers. Loki when you need logs. Tempo when you need traces.