What is Grafana?

Short answer

Grafana is an open-source platform for visualizing and analyzing metrics, logs, and traces. It supports multiple data sources and provides rich dashboarding capabilities.

How it works

Grafana connects to data sources like Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and InfluxDB. Users create dashboards with panels that query these sources and display results as graphs, tables, and alerts.

Example

{
  "title": "CPU Usage",
  "targets": [
    {
      "expr": "100 - (avg(irate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="idle"}[5m])) * 100)"
    }
  ]
}

Why it matters

Grafana provides a unified view of system health. It enables teams to correlate metrics from different sources and share dashboards across the organization.

Tips

• Use variables for dynamic dashboards.
• Set up alerting directly in Grafana.
• Use annotations to mark deployments.

Common issues

• Query performance affects dashboard load times.
• Timezone mismatches cause confusion.
• Dashboard sprawl makes maintenance difficult.