• Users appreciate Grafana's rich features but criticize its complexity and brittleness.
• Tools like Prometheus and Grafana are seen as over-engineered, especially with components like Mimir requiring dedicated infrastructure.
• Concerns exist about the future of self-hosted Grafana due to frequent breaking changes.
• Some suggest simpler, stable alternatives for monitoring such as Prometheus alone, Zabbix, VictoriaMetrics, or newer tools like SigNoz, OpenObserve, and Perses.
• The community desires a stable, reliable "boring" monitoring stack rather than constant feature churn.

Overall, there is notable dissatisfaction with Grafana’s direction and operational demands, particularly among smaller teams or startups seeking sustainable solutions.

tl;dw (best DevOps tools in 2023)

1. Low-budget cloud computing : Civo (close to Scaleway)
2. Infrastructure and Service Management: Crossplane
3. App Management - manifests : cdk8s (yes, not Kustomize or Helm)
4. App Management - k8s operators: tie between Knative and Crossplane
5. App Management - managed services: Google Cloud Run
6. Dev Envs: Okteto (yeap, not GitPod)
7. CI/CD: GitHub Actions (as it's simplest to use)
8. GitOps (CD): Argo CD (wins with Flux due to its adoption rate)
9. Policy Management: Kyverno (simpler to use than industry's most powerful tool: OPA / Gatekeeper)
10. Observability: OpenTelemetry (instrumentation of apps), VictoriaMetrics (metrics - yes not Prometheus), Grafana / Loki (logs), Grafana Tempo (tracing), Grafana (dashboards), Robusta (alerting), Komodor (troubleshooting)