Glossary · Monitoring

Grafana

Grafana is an open-source platform for building dashboards and alerts from many data sources, such as Prometheus, databases and log stores.

Updated October 6, 2026

Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics application. It connects to data sources, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Loki and SQL databases, and lets users build dashboards with graphs, tables, gauges and heatmaps. It also supports alert rules and sharing of dashboards.

Why it matters

Raw metrics are hard to read. A good dashboard shows the state of a service at a glance and lets responders drill into the time range around an incident. Because Grafana is source-agnostic, one interface can combine metrics, logs and traces from different systems. Grafana is a presentation layer: it does not collect metrics itself.

Example

A Prometheus-backed panel showing request rate by status class:

sum by (status) (rate(http_requests_total[5m]))

Typical dashboard sections are traffic, errors, latency and saturation, often called the "four golden signals".

Common mistakes

  • Building a wall of charts nobody understands. Keep dashboards focused on questions.
  • Treating a dashboard as monitoring. Someone must be alerted when a line crosses a limit.
  • Failing to keep dashboards in version control, so edits get lost.
  • Exposing dashboards publicly without access control.

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