Grafana
Grafana is an open-source analytics and interactive visualisation platform that connects to any data source — from Prometheus and InfluxDB to PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch — and transforms raw data into actionable dashboards. It is the industry-standard frontend for observability, used by organisations of all sizes to unify their metrics, logs, and traces into a single pane of glass.
Key Features
- Universal data source integration — Connects to 60+ data sources including Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Loki, MySQL, PostgreSQL, AWS CloudWatch, and Azure Monitor.
- Rich, customisable dashboards — Build interactive dashboards with graphs, heatmaps, tables, gauges, stat panels, and geospatial maps. Every panel is fully configurable with drag-and-drop layout.
- Alerting engine — Centralised alerting that works across all data sources. Create alert rules directly in the dashboard builder with multi-channel notifications to Slack, PagerDuty, email, and Telegram.
- Explore mode for ad-hoc analysis — A dedicated query-based interface for digging into data without building a full dashboard. Switch between metrics, logs, and traces in a single view.
- Unified observability with Loki — When paired with Grafana Loki, you can jump from a metric spike directly to the associated log lines, correlating what happened with why.
- Role-based access control — Organisations, teams, and folders with granular permissions let you control who can view, edit, or administer dashboards and data sources.
- Annotations and reporting — Mark important events (deployments, incidents) directly on graphs, and schedule PDF reports to be emailed automatically to stakeholders.
- Extensive plugin ecosystem — Hundreds of community and enterprise plugins for visualisation, data sources, and panel types, plus a public dashboard library.
Why Use Grafana?
If your monitoring stack produces data, Grafana makes it useful. Rather than learning each tool’s bespoke UI, you standardise on Grafana’s single, beautiful interface. Its unmatched data source compatibility means it works with what you already have, and its alerting features turn raw monitoring into a collaborative incident response platform.
Use Cases
- Unify infrastructure monitoring across a hybrid cloud environment, showing AWS, GCP, and on-premise metrics side-by-side in a single dashboard.
- Build an application performance dashboard that correlates Prometheus application metrics, PostgreSQL query performance, and Loki application logs.
- Set up a business intelligence dashboard from operational databases — visualise sales figures, user registrations, or revenue in real time from a PostgreSQL data source.
Platform
Linux · macOS · Windows · Docker · Kubernetes
Licence
AGPL-3.0