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Grafana

Grafana is an open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.

Core Features​

  • Visualizations: Fast and flexible client-side graphs with a multitude of options. Panel plugins offer many different ways to visualize metrics and logs.
  • Dynamic Dashboards: Create dynamic and reusable dashboards with template variables that appear as dropdowns at the top of the dashboard.
  • Explore Metrics: Explore your data through ad-hoc queries and dynamic drilldown. Split view and compare different time ranges, queries, and data sources side by side.
  • Alerting: Visually define alert rules for your most important metrics. Grafana will continuously evaluate and send notifications to systems like Slack, PagerDuty, VictorOps, OpsGenie.
  • Mixed Data Sources: Mix different data sources in the same graph. You can specify a data source on a per-query basis.

Connecting Data Sources​

Grafana supports a wide range of data sources natively, including:

  • Prometheus
  • Graphite
  • InfluxDB
  • Elasticsearch
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • CloudWatch

To add a data source, navigate to Configuration -> Data Sources in the Grafana UI and enter the connection details.

Dashboards and Panels​

A Dashboard is a set of one or more Panels organized and arranged into one or more Rows.

Panels​

Panels are the basic visualization building blocks. Grafana provides several types of panels:

  • Graph: The most common panel, used for time series data.
  • Stat: Displays one or more summary stats (e.g., current value, min, max, average).
  • Gauge: A classic gauge visualization.
  • Bar gauge: A bar visualization.
  • Table: Displays data in a tabular format.
  • Text: Allows you to add markdown or HTML to your dashboard.

Best Practices​

  • Use template variables: Avoid hardcoding server names or metrics. Use variables to make dashboards reusable across different environments or applications.
  • Organize with folders: Group related dashboards into folders for easier navigation.
  • Set up alerting: Configure alerts on critical metrics to be notified of issues proactively.
  • Leverage community dashboards: Grafana's community offers thousands of pre-built dashboards for common applications and systems. You can import these directly into your instance.