In the years before Grafana the situation was not much better either. Graphite's render endpoint was decent and functional, but Grafana was the first that would let you easily make nice looking graphs and dashboard. I remember there was Giraffe[0] which came close and some other alternatives[1], most of them are dead now. I'm really looking forward to using the Library panels, a feature I always found lacking.

I always found it a nice gesture by Raintank that they took in the Graphite project and are maintaining it to this day.

[0] https://github.com/kenhub/giraffe [1] https://graphite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tools.html#visuali...