What is Grafana?

• Grafana open source software enables you to query, visualize, alert on, and explore your metrics, logs, and traces wherever they are stored.

• Grafana OSS provides you with tools to turn your time-series database (TSDB) data into insightful graphs and visualizations.

• The Grafana OSS plugin framework also enables you to connect other data sources like NoSQL/SQL databases, ticketing tools like Jira or ServiceNow, and CI/CD tooling like GitLab.

What are the features of Grafana?

• Here are some features of Grafana:

  • Visualization

    Grafana uses panels as the basic building block for visualization. Panels can contain graphs, tables, heatmaps, freetext, and Singlestat. They can also integrate with community-created and proprietary plugins.

  • Dashboards

    Grafana dashboards automate the collection, management, and display of data. They allow teams to visualize and move among all of their data in one place.

  • Data sources

    Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including popular time series databases like Graphite and SQL databases like MySQL. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch and Microsoft Azure.

  • Customization

    Grafana is highly customizable and provides real-time monitoring capabilities.

  • Infrastructure monitoring

    Grafana can be used to monitor the health and performance of infrastructure components such as servers, databases, and networks.

  • Application monitoring

    Grafana can be used to monitor application performance metrics such as response time, error rates, and throughput.

Why Grafana?

• Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on, and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Create, explore, and share beautiful dashboards with your team and foster a data-driven culture.

What type of monitoring can be done via Grafana?

• Grafana can be used for the following types of monitoring:

  • Application monitoring

    Grafana can monitor application performance metrics like response time, throughput, and error rates.

  • Log monitoring

    Grafana can analyze logs and create visualizations of log data to identify anomalies, patterns, and trends.

  • Cloud monitoring

    Grafana supports monitoring of cloud services and resources. This includes monitoring databases, storage, compute instances, and other cloud-specific metrics.

  • System monitoring

    Grafana can monitor OS level statistics like CPU load, memory usage, disk usage, and network stat.

  • Time series analysis

    Grafana is a valuable tool for assessing error frequencies, categorizing error types, understanding contextual scenarios, and tracking user behavior.

What databases work with Grafana?

• Grafana uses an embedded sqlite3 database to store users, dashboards, and other persistent data by default. For high availability, you must use a shared database to store this data. This shared database can be either MySQL or Postgres.

What are metrics and visualizations in Grafana?

• In Grafana, metrics are numerical data points that are collected over time to measure a system's performance.

• Visualizations are graphical representations of these metrics, such as graphs, tables, and gauges.

What is the difference between Grafana vs Prometheus?

• Prometheus collects rich metrics and provides a powerful querying language; Grafana transforms metrics into meaningful visualizations.