Grafana is the most recognized open source project for dashboarding. It has the concept of data sources, which are nothing more than integrations with data backends. At the time of writing, the following are the available data sources:
- Prometheus
- Graphite
- InfluxDB
- Elasticsearch
- Google Stackdriver
- AWS CloudWatch
- Azure Monitor
- Loki (logging visualization)
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Microsoft SQL Server
- OpenTSDB
- TestData (useful for generating fake data for testing)
Several efforts have been made to improve the integration of Prometheus into Grafana—for example, PromQL autocompletion. Currently, Grafana is the go-to dashboarding solution for anyone interested in visualizing Prometheus data. The previous sentence isn't completely true, because we know that for exploratory queries, there's nothing like the Prometheus expression browser. Recently, though, after the release of version 6.0.0, a feature called Explore was introduced in Grafana as an alternative expression browser.
Grafana is built and preconfigured with automation in mind. In the following examples, we will demonstrate how you can pretty much set up an environment without touching the main configuration file. A noteworthy benefit is that Grafana comes natively instrumented with Prometheus metrics.