Grafana
Grafana is the visualization and exploration layer for observability data. It usually sits on top of Prometheus, Loki, Datadog, or tracing backends.
What It Is Used For
- Building operational dashboards.
- Exploring metrics and logs interactively.
- Creating alerts from charted data.
- Organizing telemetry into folders and team-owned views.
Core Ideas
- Data sources connect Grafana to backends.
- Dashboards group panels into a single operational view.
- Variables let one dashboard serve multiple environments or services.
- Alerting turns charts into actionable signals.
Good Dashboard Habits
- Build dashboards around a question, not around raw data volume.
- Keep a small number of high-signal panels near the top.
- Use variables for cluster, namespace, environment, and service filters.
- Avoid mixing unrelated systems on the same page.
Example Data Sources
- Prometheus for metrics.
- Loki for logs.
- Jaeger or Tempo for traces.
- Datadog for managed observability.
Practical Notes
- Grafana does not store the telemetry itself.
- If dashboards are hard to understand, the problem is usually layout or data model, not the chart plugin.
- Provision dashboards and data sources as code when the stack becomes shared.