An SRE was asked to present uptime data to the board. Raw Prometheus queries were not going to work. They needed charts. Beautiful, executive-friendly charts.
The Visualization Gap
Data without visualization is just numbers. Paid BI tools (Tableau, Looker) cost $70-100/user/month. For operational dashboards, that is overkill.
Grafana is the free, open-source visualization platform. Connect any data source, build stunning dashboards.
What Grafana Offers for Free
- 50+ Data Sources - Prometheus, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Loki
- Beautiful Dashboards - Graphs, heatmaps, gauges, tables, maps, alerts
- Alerting - Alert rules with notification to Slack, email, PagerDuty
- Dashboard Library - 1000s of community dashboards ready to import
- Variables - Dynamic dashboards with dropdown filters
- Annotations - Mark events (deployments, incidents) on graphs
- Provisioning - Dashboards as code (YAML/JSON)
- LDAP/SSO - Enterprise auth for free
Quick Start
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana-oss
# Open http://localhost:3000 (admin/admin)
GitHub: grafana/grafana - 66K+ stars
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