Grafana
Visualising time-series metrics and logs from monitoring systems as live dashboards
Grafana is an open-source observability and visualisation platform that connects to time-series databases, log aggregators, and metrics sources to display operational data as dashboards. Engineers use it to monitor the health and performance of servers, applications, and cloud services by querying data from backends such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and cloud provider metrics APIs. Dashboards consist of panels configured with queries and thresholds that update in real time, and alerting rules can be set to notify teams via Slack, PagerDuty, or email when metrics cross defined boundaries. Grafana is the most widely deployed open-source dashboarding tool in DevOps, platform engineering, and site reliability engineering environments.
Official Website
Grafana official site →Pricing
View pricing →Grafana Use Cases
- Building real-time dashboards that visualise CPU, memory, request rate, and error metrics from production infrastructure and applications
- Querying Prometheus metrics using PromQL to plot time-series panels for container and microservice observability across a Kubernetes cluster
- Configuring alert rules that notify teams through Slack or PagerDuty when latency, error rates, or resource usage cross defined thresholds
- Combining metrics panels with log stream panels sourced from Loki or Elasticsearch to correlate performance dips with application log output
- Sharing standardised dashboard templates across engineering teams to maintain consistent observability across services and environments
Grafana Learning Resources
The official Grafana documentation at grafana.com/docs covers installation, data sources, and dashboard creation in full. Grafana's own free Play environment at play.grafana.com provides a live instance pre-loaded with dashboards for exploration without setup.