What is Grafana?

Grafana is an open-source data visualization, monitoring, and analysis platform. It allows you to query, visualize, set up alerts, and explore your metrics no matter where they are stored. It gives you the tools to transform your time-series database (TSDB) data into beautiful graphs and visualizations.

Grafana allows users to create dashboards with panels, each displaying specific metrics over a set period. Each dashboard is versatile and can be customized for a project or any development and business needs.

The following sections provide an overview of what you might want to set up in the Grafana database.

Examining metrics and logs

The system allows you to explore your data with ad hoc queries and dynamic drill-down. You can simultaneously split a view and compare different time ranges, questions, and data sources.

Alerts

If you use alerts in Grafana, you can send them using several different alert methods, including PagerDuty, SMS, Email, VictorOps, OpsGenie, or Slack.

If you prefer other communication channels, Alert hooks allow you to create various notifiers with a small amount of code. Visually define alert rules for the most important metrics.

Annotations

Comment on graphs with a large number of events from different data sources. Hover over events to see full event metadata and tags.

A feature such as a graph marker displayed in Grafana is useful for correlating data if something goes wrong. You can create annotations manually - just Control-click on the graph and enter text. You can also get data from any data source.

Toolbar Variables

Template variables allow you to create dashboards that can be reused for many use cases. The values are not programmed with these templates; for example, you can use the same dashboard for both if you have a production and test server.

Templates allow you to drill down into data from all available data to North America, Texas, etc. You can also share these dashboards between teams in your organization, or if you create a good dashboard template for a popular data source, you can share it with the whole community for customization and use.