What is Grafana

Grafana is often called the “open platform for beautiful analytics and monitoring”. It supports:

• visualization via dashboards that are dynamic by template variables represented as dropdown boxes

• role and organization concept to access dashboards, results and metrics

• plugin concept to add:

  • Data sources

    Data Source plugins allow you to extend Grafana to connect to different databases and online sources (e.g. Prometheus, InfluxDB) that can also be combined.

  • Panels

    Panel plugins allow new data visualizations to be added to Grafana, for both time series and non-time series data.

  • Apps

    Apps are bundles of panels, data sources, dashboards and new user interface pages. They represent an application right within Grafana.

• annotations upon graphs to mark outages with a description

• ad-hoc filters that can be applied to existing queries

• alerting – defines rules on important metrics that are continuously evaluated

• notifications over various channels (e-mail, webhooks, PagerDuty, Telegram, SMS) that are triggered by alerting rules