📊Grafana

NEW

Open-source visualization and analytics platform for building dashboards over metrics, logs, and traces.

DESCRIPTION

Grafana provides interactive dashboards for time-series metrics, logs, and traces from many data sources. It integrates with Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Elastic, and cloud monitoring providers. Grafana supports alerting, role-based access, and templating for reusable dashboards. It is widely used for observability, capacity planning, and SLO reporting across microservices and data platforms.

ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS

Grafana Labs

Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on, and explore your metrics, logs, and traces wherever they are stored.

Highlights multi-signal observability and broad data source support.

Source

Wikipedia

Grafana is a multi-platform open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application.

Positions Grafana broadly as analytics and visualization software.

Source

RELATED TERMS

Prometheus Time Series Database Dashboard Observability Logs Traces Alerting Visualization

COMPETING TERMS

Kibana Chronograf

KNOWLEDGE AREAS

Observability & Telemetry Platform & Tooling Data Visualization

TARGET AUDIENCE

DevOps Engineer MLOps Engineer Software Developer Data Engineer BI Specialist IT Manager

EXTERNAL SOURCES

• Wikipedia - Grafana
• Grafana Labs - Official Grafana documentation
• Prometheus Project - Using Grafana with Prometheus

TOP QUESTIONS

What data sources can Grafana use?

Grafana supports Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, cloud monitoring APIs, SQL databases, and many others via plugins.

Category: Overview

How does Grafana support SLO dashboards?

PromQL or other queries compute SLIs, and panels visualize burn rates, budgets, and time windows. Templating creates reusable SLO views across services.

Category: Example

What is a common Grafana mistake?

Overly dense dashboards without clear questions cause alert fatigue and misinterpretation. Keep panels focused and documented.

Category: Mistakes

How does Grafana handle alerting?

Grafana Alerting defines rules on queries and routes notifications to channels like Slack, email, or PagerDuty, with grouping and silencing.

Category: Definition

How do you manage Grafana at scale?

Use provisioning for datasources, dashboards-as-code, and role-based access control. Backup configurations and enforce versioning.

Category: Management

Can Grafana visualize logs and traces?

Yes, through integrations like Loki for logs and Tempo for traces, enabling correlation across signals.

Category: Integration

What’s the difference between Grafana and Kibana?

Grafana is multi-source with rich time-series features; Kibana is tightly integrated with Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack.

Category: Comparison

How does Grafana support multi-tenancy?

Organizations and folders segment access. Enterprise features add fine-grained permissions and SSO integrations.

Category: Management

How to start with Grafana?

Install Grafana, add a data source, import a community dashboard, then iterate with templating and alerts.

Category: GettingStarted