Beyond monitoring: visualising operational data
Monitoring systems collect metrics, but presenting them in a comprehensible way is a separate problem. Static dashboards with predefined charts are not enough when every team has different needs: developers want to see latency per endpoint, ops want resource consumption per node, management wants weekly trends. Grafana, created by Torkel Odegaard, was built as a universal visualisation platform: it does not collect data, but presents it, connecting to any source and transforming it into interactive dashboards.
The project begins as a fork of Kibana in 2013 and quickly evolves into an independent platform. Released under the Apache 2.0 licence, by 2017 it is already the de facto standard for metric visualisation in the open source ecosystem.
Pluggable data sources
Grafana’s architecture is built around data source plugins: connectors that query different data sources through a uniform interface. Built-in data sources include Prometheus, Graphite, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL and many others. Each panel in a dashboard can query a different data source, making it possible to display application metrics, infrastructure data and logs on the same screen.
The separation between visualisation and storage is intentional: Grafana does not impose a technology choice for data collection but adapts to the existing infrastructure.
Composable dashboards
Dashboards are composed of panels — line charts, bars, gauges, tables, heatmaps — freely arranged on a grid. Variables make dashboards dynamic: a dropdown menu allows selecting the environment (staging, production), the service or the instance, and all panels update accordingly. Annotations overlay events onto charts — deploys, incidents, configuration changes — visually correlating metrics and actions.
Alerting and sharing
The built-in alerting system allows defining thresholds directly on panels and receiving notifications when metrics exceed the configured limits. Dashboards can be shared via link, exported as JSON or organised into folders with granular permissions. Grafana supports authentication through LDAP, OAuth and enterprise identity providers, making it suitable for organisations with multiple teams.
Link: grafana.com