Grafana
Properties
created
14.04.2026, 17:00
modified
26.07.2026, 13:47
published
Empty
sources
Grafana Docs
topics
Observability, LGTM Stack, Visualization
authors
Empty
ai-assisted
Yes
- Open-source visualization and dashboarding platform ( Grafana Docs)
- The G in the LGTM stack — the single UI layer over all observability backends
- Does not store data itself — queries data sources and renders results
# Data Sources
- Connects to any backend via data source plugins
- Metrics: Prometheus, Mimir, Graphite, InfluxDB
- Logs: Loki, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch Logs
- Traces: Tempo, Jaeger, Zipkin, AWS X-Ray
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.
- Multiple data sources can be queried in a single dashboard
# Key Features
# Dashboards
- Panels arranged on a grid — each panel is a query + visualization
- Visualization types: time series, bar chart, stat, gauge, table, heatmap, geomap
- Variables — dynamic dropdowns that parameterize queries (e.g. select environment, service)
- Annotations — mark events on time series graphs (deployments, incidents)
# Explore
- Ad-hoc query interface without a pre-built dashboard
- Switch between data sources and query types fluidly
- Essential for incident investigation
# Correlations (the killer feature)
- Trace to logs — from a Tempo span, jump to Loki logs filtered to that service + time
- Trace to metrics — from a Tempo span, open Prometheus metrics for that service
- Logs to traces — from a Loki log line containing a
traceId, jump to Tempo trace - Exemplars — Prometheus data points linked to a specific trace ID
# Alerting
- Unified alerting across all data sources (Grafana 8+)
- Alert rules defined in dashboards or standalone
- Routes to Alertmanager, Slack, PagerDuty, email, OpsGenie, etc.
# Grafana Cloud vs Self-Hosted
- Grafana Cloud — managed SaaS, includes hosted Loki, Tempo, Mimir
- Self-hosted — deploy via Helm chart (
grafana/grafana), Docker, or binary - Grafana Enterprise — adds RBAC, data source permissions, reporting, auditing