Grafana is an open source observability platform that enables users to query, visualize, alert on, and understand their metrics, logs, traces, and profiles regardless of where they are stored. Developed by Grafana Labs, it serves as a centralized solution for monitoring and analyzing data across diverse environments.
Key Features:
- Multi-Data Source Integration: Connect to over 100+ data sources including Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Graphite, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and cloud services like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
- Interactive Dashboards: Create, explore, and share customizable dashboards with rich visualization options (graphs, charts, tables, heatmaps).
- Alerting System: Set up alerts based on metrics, logs, or traces with notifications via email, Slack, PagerDuty, and more.
- OpenTelemetry Support: Native integration with OpenTelemetry for standardized telemetry data collection.
- AI-Powered Insights: Grafana Assistant (AI tool) helps analyze data, fix dashboards, and provide contextual insights.
- Incident Response Management (IRM): End-to-end workflows for alerting, on-call management, and incident resolution.
- LGTM+ Stack: Unified telemetry backend with Loki (logs), Grafana (visualization), Tempo (traces), and Mimir (metrics).
- Plugins Ecosystem: Extend functionality with community and enterprise plugins for data sources, apps, and panels.
- Cloud and Self-Hosted Options: Grafana Cloud (managed service) and Grafana OSS (self-hosted) for flexible deployment.
Use Cases:
- Infrastructure Monitoring: Track server performance, Kubernetes clusters, containers, and cloud resources.
- Application Observability: Monitor application performance, user experience, and business metrics.
- Log Analysis: Aggregate and query logs from applications and infrastructure using Grafana Loki.
- Distributed Tracing: Analyze request flows and latency with Grafana Tempo for microservices.
- Cost Optimization: Manage and optimize observability spend with adaptive telemetry features.
- Incident Management: Streamline detection, response, and post-mortem analysis with IRM tools.
Target Users: DevOps engineers, SREs, developers, IT operations teams, and business analysts who need unified observability across their stack.
