What is Grafana?
Grafana is an open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application that provides charts, graphs, and alerts when connected to supported data sources. It's the de facto standard for visualizing time series data and creating monitoring dashboards for infrastructure, applications, and business metrics.
Originally designed for time series data from sources like Graphite, Grafana has evolved to support a wide variety of data sources including Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, cloud monitoring services, and traditional databases, making it a versatile platform for observability and business intelligence.
Grafana Deployment Calculator
Queries: 800/min (1.2M/day)
Concurrent Users: 10
Alert Evaluations: 30/min
Grafana Core Components
Dashboards
Collections of panels that display visualizations from data sources.
• Tables and stat panels
• Heatmaps and histograms
• Custom panel plugins
Data Sources
Connections to databases, monitoring systems, and APIs.
• MySQL, PostgreSQL
• Elasticsearch, Loki
• Cloud services (AWS, GCP)
Alerting
Rule-based alerting with multiple notification channels.
• Slack, Email, PagerDuty
• Alert grouping and silencing
• Custom notification templates
Variables/Templating
Dynamic dashboard components for interactive filtering.
• Custom variables
• Multi-value selection
• URL parameter integration
Grafana Query Examples
Prometheus Queries
100 - (avg(rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode="idle"}[5m])) by (instance) * 100)
# Memory usage percentage
(1 - (node_memory_MemAvailable_bytes / node_memory_MemTotal_bytes)) * 100
# HTTP request rate
sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) by (status_code)
InfluxDB Queries
WHERE $timeFilter
GROUP BY time($__interval), "host" fill(null)
SELECT derivative(mean("bytes_sent"), 1s) as "throughput"
FROM "network" WHERE $timeFilter
GROUP BY time($__interval) fill(0)
MySQL Queries
SELECT
created_at as time,
COUNT(*) as orders_count
FROM orders
WHERE $__timeFilter(created_at)
GROUP BY DATE(created_at)
ORDER BY created_atReal-World Grafana Implementations
DigitalOcean
Uses Grafana for customer-facing monitoring dashboards and internal operations.
- • Customer droplet monitoring
- • Infrastructure health dashboards
- • Network performance metrics
- • Business metrics visualization
PayPal
Leverages Grafana for financial transaction monitoring and fraud detection.
- • Real-time transaction volume
- • Fraud detection metrics
- • Payment processing latency
- • Regional performance analysis
JPMorgan Chase
Implements Grafana for trading systems monitoring and risk management.
- • Trading system performance
- • Risk management dashboards
- • Market data visualization
- • Compliance monitoring
CERN
Uses Grafana for Large Hadron Collider operations and scientific data analysis.
- • Particle accelerator monitoring
- • Experimental data visualization
- • Infrastructure health tracking
- • Scientific research dashboards
Dashboard Design Patterns
Infrastructure Monitoring
- • RED metrics: Rate, Errors, Duration
- • USE metrics: Utilization, Saturation, Errors
- • Golden signals overview panels
- • Resource utilization heatmaps
- • Alert status and incident tracking
- • Service dependency visualization
Business Intelligence
- • KPI overview with stat panels
- • Time series trends and forecasting
- • Conversion funnel visualization
- • Geographic distribution maps
- • Revenue and growth metrics
- • Customer behavior analytics
Grafana Best Practices
✅ Do
- • Design dashboards for specific audiences
- • Use consistent color schemes and layouts
- • Implement proper variable templating
- • Set up meaningful alert rules and notifications
- • Use appropriate visualization types for data
- • Document dashboard purpose and usage
❌ Don't
- • Overcrowd dashboards with too many panels
- • Use default time ranges for all panels
- • Ignore query performance optimization
- • Create alerts without proper testing
- • Mix different data granularities carelessly
- • Forget to set up dashboard permissions