What happened to grafana quality? Good alternatives?

Question

Over the last 4 years or so, Grafana has degraded to the point where it is unusable. It was seriously one of my favorite pieces of software. What was once a simple, sleek product that did one thing and did it well, has now turned into a bloated, rage inducing amalgamation of half broken features that is nearly impossible to use.A UI that has 5 layers of nested scrollbars, overriding of the right click, a query language that is a mashup of many different half baked filter languages, alerting in which 80% of the alerts are 5xx errors or timeouts from grafana itself, rather than errors in my application, the list goes on and on. The final nail in the coffin was waking up and all of a sudden my metrics are gone when my app hasn't changed at all. I'm tired of debugging it.Sorry for the rant but it is upsetting that dumping a pile of VC cash onto a product that was good has made it such a steaming dumpster fire.Prefer OSS solutions with the ability to self host, but other alternatives are also welcome.

torkelo · Accepted Answer

Creator of Grafana here, would love to fix this. Grafana like most software is not immune to bloat over time (constant battle). Saying no to features requested by many users, esp ones implemented by the community contributed is one of the hardest things. Sometimes we get it wrong and add unnecessary features or add features that make everything else harder (a pet peeve of mine, and something always try to minimize).
I am curious
* Where are there 5 layers of nested scrollbars? * Where does Grafana override right click?
> alerting in which 80% of the alerts are 5xx errors or timeouts from grafana itself
That is strange, will have the alert team look into that. Not something I have seen in many issues reports. But I recall some timeout issues with more than 100K alert rules.
> The final nail in the coffin was waking up and all of a sudden my metrics are gone when my app hasn't changed at all. I'm tired of debugging it.
Grafana does not store any metrics, did you mean something else here?
> half broken features that is nearly impossible to use.
Any specifics would help and we can hopefully fix it.