Grafana

Grafana is an open-source visualisation and dashboarding platform for time-series and observability data. It connects to many data sources (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Elasticsearch, MySQL, BigQuery, CloudWatch, Datadog) and renders queries as panels: graphs, tables, heatmaps, single-stat tiles, and more.

Core capabilities

• Dashboards. Compositions of panels with shared time ranges and variable templating.
• Multi-source. A single dashboard can pull metrics, logs, and traces from different backends.
• Alerting. Unified alert rules across data sources, routed via contact points to Slack, PagerDuty, email, webhooks.
• Annotations. Mark deployments, incidents, or events on graphs for context.
• Variables. Dropdowns that re-template a dashboard (per environment, per service, per region).

The Grafana stack

• Prometheus / Mimir: metrics
• Loki: logs
• Tempo: distributed traces
• Pyroscope: continuous profiling
• Faro: frontend observability

Together these form an open-source observability stack maintained by Grafana Labs.

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Related Terms Observability, Prometheus, Metrics, Logging, Distributed Tracing, OpenTelemetry

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Further Reading What is API Observability? Logs, Metrics, Traces Explained