Introduction to Grafana
Grafana is the open-source platform for monitoring and observability that allows you to query, visualize, alert on, and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored.What is Grafana?
Grafana enables you to create, explore, and share dashboards with your team and foster a data-driven culture. Whether you’re monitoring application performance, infrastructure metrics, or business KPIs, Grafana provides a unified interface for all your observability needs.Key Features
Rich Visualizations
Fast and flexible client-side graphs with a multitude of options. Panel plugins offer many different ways to visualize metrics and logs with customizable field configurations, units, and thresholds.
Multi-Datasource Support
Mix different data sources in the same graph. Specify a data source on a per-query basis, supporting Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and many more through the plugin system.
Dynamic Dashboards
Create dynamic and reusable dashboards with template variables that appear as dropdowns at the top of the dashboard. Control time ranges, queries, and display options interactively.
Powerful Alerting
Visually define alert rules for your most important metrics. Grafana continuously evaluates conditions and sends notifications to systems like Slack, PagerDuty, VictorOps, and OpsGenie.
Explore View
Explore your data through ad-hoc queries and dynamic drilldown. Split view and compare different time ranges, queries, and data sources side by side.
Log Exploration
Experience seamless switching from metrics to logs with preserved label filters. Quickly search through all your logs or stream them live with integrated log visualization.
Architecture Overview
Grafana consists of two main components:Backend (pkg/)
The Go-based backend handles:
- API Server (
pkg/api/) - HTTP API handlers and routes for dashboards, data sources, and users - Services (
pkg/services/) - Business logic organized by domain (alerting, dashboards, authentication) - Data Source Backends (
pkg/tsdb/) - Query backends for time series databases - Plugin System (
pkg/plugins/) - Dynamic plugin loading and management
Frontend (public/app/)
The TypeScript/React frontend provides:
- Dashboard Interface (
public/app/features/dashboard/) - Interactive dashboard editing and viewing - Data Source Management (
public/app/features/datasources/) - Configure and test data source connections - Explore (
public/app/features/explore/) - Ad-hoc query and data exploration - Alerting UI (
public/app/features/alerting/) - Visual alert rule management
Use Cases
Infrastructure Monitoring
Track server metrics, CPU usage, memory consumption, and network traffic across your entire infrastructure with real-time dashboards.Application Performance
Monitor application response times, error rates, and throughput. Correlate metrics with logs to troubleshoot issues quickly.Business Analytics
Visualize business KPIs, sales metrics, and user behavior data from databases and analytics platforms.IoT and Sensor Data
Collect and visualize time-series data from IoT devices and sensors with support for various protocols and data formats.Getting Started
Quickstart Guide
Get up and running with Grafana in minutes. Install, configure a data source, and create your first dashboard.
Core Concepts
Learn about dashboards, panels, data sources, queries, and other fundamental concepts in Grafana.
Community and Support
Grafana is developed under the AGPL-3.0 license with a vibrant open-source community:- GitHub: github.com/grafana/grafana
- Community Forums: Active discussions and support from users worldwide
- Slack: Join the official Grafana Slack for real-time community help
- Documentation: Comprehensive guides at grafana.com/docs
Grafana is production-ready and used by thousands of organizations worldwide, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.