Grafana
In depthMonitoring
Open-source platform for visualising metrics and logs in rich, configurable dashboards.
Grafana, explained
Written by EduVerseWhat it is
Grafana is an open-source tool for building dashboards from monitoring data. It doesn’t store most of that data itself: it connects to sources such as Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch or a SQL database and turns their numbers into graphs, tables and alerts that a whole team can look at.
Why teams use it
Raw metrics are just long lists of numbers over time. A good dashboard shows at a glance whether response times, error rates or memory use look normal, and alert rules notify someone when they don’t. That shared picture helps a team notice trouble early and agree on what’s going on.
An example from work
During your first on-call week you get an alert in Slack with a link to a Grafana dashboard. The response time panel jumped right after the last deploy, while the traffic panel next to it stayed flat. You share a screenshot in the incident channel and the team decides to roll back.
Our own explanation, not a quote from the book.
In the book
Sentences from The Software Realm, Decoded that mention Grafana, exactly as printed.
1 more passages about Grafana in the full book
Read every conversation where Grafana comes up, with the interactive slides and demos.
Where it fits
Monitoring dashboards, alerting, performance insight
Coverage in the book
Covered in depth: multiple pages with explanations, examples and simulations.
