Day 72 — Monitoring with Grafana
1️⃣ What is Grafana?
Grafana is an open-source monitoring and visualization platform that allows you to query, analyze, and display metrics from different data sources in real-time dashboards.
It helps teams observe infrastructure, applications, and services through interactive charts and alerts.
2️⃣ Why Grafana?
You can’t manually monitor infrastructure 24/7 — Grafana does it smartly by providing:
• Centralized dashboards for multiple environments.
• Real-time metric visualization.
• Custom alerts that notify you when something’s wrong.
• Easy integration with tools like Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, InfluxDB, and more.
In short — Grafana turns raw monitoring data into insightful visuals and alerts.
3️⃣ Features of Grafana
• Interactive Dashboards — Create panels, graphs, and charts with drag-and-drop.
• Alerting System — Send notifications via email, Slack, PagerDuty, etc.
• Multi-Source Support — Connect to over 30+ data sources like Prometheus, MySQL, Elasticsearch, AWS CloudWatch, and Loki.
• Plugins — Extend functionality with custom panels and data source plugins.
• User Management — Control who can view, edit, or administer dashboards.
• Annotations — Mark events on graphs to visualize changes (like deployments or outages).
4️⃣ What Type of Monitoring Can Be Done via Grafana?
• Infrastructure Monitoring — Servers, CPU, Memory, Disk, Network.
• Application Monitoring — Microservices, APIs, latency, error rates.
• Cloud Monitoring — AWS, Azure, GCP metrics via native integrations.
• Container Monitoring — Kubernetes, Docker metrics through Prometheus.
• Business Metrics — Custom metrics like sales, traffic, user signups, etc.
5️⃣ Databases That Work with Grafana
Grafana connects to a wide range of data sources, including:
• Prometheus
• InfluxDB
• Graphite
• Elasticsearch
• AWS CloudWatch
• MySQL / PostgreSQL
• Loki (for logs)
6️⃣ Metrics and Visualizations in Grafana
• Metrics → Quantitative data points collected from systems (e.g., CPU usage, requests per second, memory utilization).
• Visualizations → How you display those metrics (graphs, heatmaps, gauges, tables, etc.).
Grafana turns metrics into actionable visualizations.
7️⃣ Grafana vs Prometheus
Feature Grafana Prometheus
Purpose Visualization & Dashboarding Data Collection & Storage
Function Displays metrics & alerts visually Scrapes metrics from targets
Data Storage No data storage (reads from sources) Built-in time-series database
Usage Used for dashboards and alerts Used for monitoring & metric scraping
Integration Uses Prometheus as a data source Exposes data to Grafana
In essence — Prometheus collects data, while Grafana visualizes it.
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