Grafana

Grafana is an open source observability and analytics platform that enables teams to query, visualize, alert on, and understand their data regardless of where it is stored. With a vast library of data source integrations, a powerful dashboarding engine, and an active plugin ecosystem, Grafana has become the de facto standard for operational dashboards in modern infrastructure and application monitoring.

The data source-agnostic architecture of Grafana is one of its most powerful characteristics. Rather than storing metrics itself, Grafana connects to external data stores and queries them on demand. Official data source plugins support Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Loki, Graphite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, ClickHouse, Datadog, Splunk, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Monitoring, and dozens of other systems. The unified query interface allows data from multiple sources to be combined in a single dashboard, providing a holistic view of complex systems.

The dashboard editor in Grafana is rich and flexible. Dashboards are composed of panels, each displaying a visualization of a query result. Panel types include time series graphs, bar charts, heatmaps, stat panels, gauges, tables, geo maps, histograms, pie charts, node graphs, and traces. Each panel type has a comprehensive set of configuration options for controlling the appearance, axis scales, legends, thresholds, and annotations.

Grafana Alerting is a unified alerting system that supports defining alert rules based on any data source query. Alerts can be evaluated at configurable intervals and routed to notification channels such as Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, email, webhooks, and more through a flexible routing policy engine. Alert state history and silencing capabilities make it practical to manage alerts in complex, large-scale environments.

The Grafana Loki project is an open source log aggregation system designed to work alongside Prometheus and Grafana. Loki indexes only the labels of log streams rather than the full log content, making it extremely cost-efficient for storing high volumes of log data. The LogQL query language enables powerful log filtering, parsing, and metric extraction, and log data can be viewed side-by-side with metrics in Grafana dashboards.

Grafana Tempo is an open source distributed tracing backend that stores and queries trace data. Together with Prometheus for metrics and Loki for logs, Tempo completes the three pillars of observability within the Grafana ecosystem. The tight integration between these tools enables correlating signals across the three pillars, making it possible to navigate from a metric spike to the associated logs and traces in a few clicks.

Grafana OnCall is an open source incident response scheduling and escalation tool that integrates with Grafana Alerting for coordinated on-call rotation management. Grafana k6 is an open source load testing tool that generates performance metrics compatible with Grafana dashboards.

Grafana Cloud is the managed cloud offering from Grafana Labs that provides hosted versions of Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, and other components with a generous free tier. Grafana Enterprise adds additional features for large organizations including enhanced security, licensing management, and priority support. Grafana can be self-hosted on any infrastructure using Docker or Kubernetes.