Grafana
By Grafana Labs
Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform for building dashboards over metrics, logs, and traces from many different data sources.
Definition
Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform for building dashboards over metrics, logs, and traces from many different data sources.
Overview
Grafana's core idea is to be a single visualization layer sitting on top of many different data backends, rather than a monitoring system that stores its own data. It connects to sources like Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and tracing backends, letting teams build unified dashboards that correlate data from all of them side by side. Dashboards are built from panels — graphs, tables, heatmaps, and other visualizations — each backed by a query against one of the connected data sources, and Grafana supports templating variables so a single dashboard can be reused across different services, environments, or clusters just by changing a dropdown. Beyond dashboards, Grafana includes alerting, so teams can define thresholds on the same queries powering their visualizations and get notified when something crosses them. It is a central piece of many observability stacks running on Kubernetes, often deployed alongside Elasticsearch or Loki for logs and Prometheus for metrics.
Key Features
- Unified dashboards over many data sources without storing data itself
- Rich panel types: graphs, tables, heatmaps, and gauges
- Native integrations with Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, and more
- Templating variables for reusable dashboards across environments
- Built-in alerting on top of existing dashboard queries
- Plugin ecosystem for additional data sources and panel types
- Open-source core with a managed cloud offering from Grafana Labs