Grafana
What it is: Open-source monitoring and observability platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces.
What It Does Best
Time-series data. Built for monitoring. Server metrics, application performance, infrastructure health.
Data source flexibility. Connects to everything: Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, MySQL, Postgres, CloudWatch.
Alerting. Set thresholds, get notified. Slack, email, PagerDuty integration.
Key Features
Multi-source dashboards: Combine Prometheus, Elasticsearch, SQL in one view
Alerting system: Threshold alerts with notifications to Slack, PagerDuty, email
Variables and templates: Dynamic dashboards that adapt to different servers/services
Plugin ecosystem: Data sources, panels, and apps from community
Annotations: Mark deployments and events on time-series graphs
Pricing
Open source: Free
Grafana Cloud: Free tier, then $8/month per user
Enterprise: $25+/user/month
When to Use It
✅ Infrastructure monitoring
✅ Application performance metrics
✅ DevOps/SRE teams
✅ Time-series visualization
✅ Need unified view across data sources
When NOT to Use It
❌ Business analytics (use Tableau/Power BI)
❌ Non-time-series data
❌ Don't have metrics infrastructure
❌ Need complex data transformations
❌ Primarily static reporting
Common Use Cases
Infrastructure monitoring: CPU, memory, disk usage across servers
Application metrics: Response times, error rates, throughput
DevOps dashboards: Deployment frequency, CI/CD pipeline metrics
IoT monitoring: Sensor data, device health, telemetry
Business metrics: Real-time revenue, user signups, system activity
Grafana vs Alternatives
vs Kibana: Grafana multi-source support; Kibana better for Elasticsearch/logs
vs Datadog: Grafana open source, flexible; Datadog all-in-one, easier setup
vs Prometheus: Prometheus for metrics storage; Grafana for visualization
Unique Strengths
Data source agnostic: Visualize from any metric system in one place
Open source: No vendor lock-in, self-hostable
Community: Huge library of pre-built dashboards
Industry standard: De facto monitoring visualization platform
Bottom line: Industry standard for monitoring dashboards. If you need to visualize how your systems are performing, Grafana is the default choice.