Grafana is a widely used open source tool that is used to monitor services and applications by visualizing time-series data. It can tell us how our services or servers are doing by showing us production business metrics. It can carry out both infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring. The official definition of Grafana is as follows:
"It is the analytics platform for all your metrics. Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert, on and understand your metrics no matter where they are stored. Create, explore, and share dashboards with your team, and foster a data-driven culture."
One of the main reasons why we would use Grafana over Prometheus is to get perfect visualization and dashboard editing. Using Grafana, it is very easy to create a dashboard and customize it. With Prometheus, on the other hand, we would need to make use of console templates to do this, which makes it a little harder to use. Other features of Grafana include the following:
- Advanced graphing
- Powerful query editors
- Visualization dashboards
- Dynamic queries and dashboards
- Multi-tenant user and organization support
- Client-side and server-side rendering of panels
- Support for many different data sources