Grafana Series - Unified Display - 1 - Introduction

Article Series

• Grafana Series Articles

Introduction to Grafana

Grafana is the first and most important product from Grafana Labs. It is positioned as a visualization tool for monitoring dashboards and observability. It is currently the most comprehensive and popular cloud-native, public cloud, and enterprise monitoring visualization platform.

Dashboard anything. Observe everything

No matter where your data is stored, you can query, visualize, alert on, and understand it. With Grafana, you can create, explore, and share all your data through beautiful, flexible dashboards.

Key Advantages of Grafana

📈 Unify Your Data, Not Your Database

Grafana does not require you to ingest data into a backend store or vendor database. Instead, Grafana takes a unique approach by unifying your existing data, wherever it lives, to provide a “single pane of glass.”

With Grafana, you can leverage any of your existing data — whether it comes from a Kubernetes cluster, a Raspberry Pi, different cloud services, or even Google Sheets — and visualize it however you want, all from a single dashboard.

👥 Sharing & Collaboration

Grafana is built on the principle that data should be accessible to everyone in your organization, not just a single operations person.

By democratizing data, Grafana helps foster a culture where data can be easily used and accessed by those who need it, helping break down data silos and empowering teams.

Grafana dashboards not only give deep meaning to data collected from numerous sources, but you can also share the dashboards you create with other team members, allowing you to explore data together.

With Grafana, anyone can create and share dynamic dashboards to foster collaboration and transparency.

Rich Dashboard Ecosystem

With Grafana, you can display:

Operations team dashboards, such as a Kubernetes Dashboard:

Development team Sprints:

Finance team Revenue:

Additionally, Grafana provides a Dashboards registry with thousands of rich and diverse dashboards.

Data Correlation

Understanding all related data — and the relationships between them — is critical for quickly resolving incidents and identifying the true root cause of unexpected system behavior. Grafana allows teams to seamlessly visualize and navigate across all their data in one place.

The most typical example is the Grafana Labs LGTM stack, which includes:

• Loki (Logging)
• Grafana (Visualization)
• Tempo (Tracing)
• Mimir (Metrics)

Through the following technical details, seamless visualization and navigation between Logging, Tracing, and Metrics can be achieved:

• Metrics -> Logs: Based on service discovery and unified labels
• Logs -> Metrics: Based on extracting metrics via LogQL
• Logs -> Traces: Based on derived fields or automated logging
• Traces -> Logs: Based on labels
• Traces -> Metrics: Based on metrics generated from spans
• Metrics -> Traces: Based on Prometheus Exemplars

As shown in the diagram below:

Even without adopting the Grafana Labs solution, a certain degree of seamless navigation is still achievable.

For example:

• Metrics with Prometheus
• Logging with EFK
• Tracing with Jaeger

If logs also include trace_id, you can at least achieve seamless Logs -> Traces navigation via trace_id.

Rich Panels

Rich panels, extensive configuration options, and colorful themes…

• Time series panels
  • Line charts
  • Area charts
  • Scatter plots
  • …
• Tables
• State timeline (as shown below)
• Stat
• Gauge
• Bar charts and pie charts
• Geomap
• Heatmap
• Logs panel
• Gantt chart
• Node graph
• …

Rich Plugins and Data Sources

Connect your tools and your team with Grafana plugins. Data source plugins hook into existing data sources via APIs and render data in real time, without requiring you to migrate or ingest your data. For example:

• Zabbix plugin and data source
• Cloudflare plugin
• JSON data source
• MySQL data source
• Elasticsearch data source
• Jaeger data source
• GitHub data source
• Zipkin data source
• Prometheus data source
• …

Alerting

With Grafana Alerting, you can create, manage, and silence all your alerts in a single, simple UI, enabling you to easily consolidate and centralize all your alerts.

Transformations

The Transformations feature is extremely powerful and essential for building professional, polished dashboards.

Transformations allow you to rename, summarize, combine, and perform calculations across different queries and data sources.

Annotations

Annotate graphs with rich events from different data sources. Hovering over an event shows the full event metadata and tags.

Panel Editor

The panel editor makes it easy to configure, customize, and explore all panels, with a consistent UI for setting data options across all visualizations.

Template Variables

Create dynamic and reusable dashboards with template variables, which appear as dropdowns at the top of the dashboard.

Mixed Data Sources

Mix different data sources in the same graph! You can specify a data source on a per-query basis. For example, display both Metrics and Logs data in a single dashboard.

Next Steps

In the upcoming articles, we will walk through all the details of unified display with Grafana, specifically covering:

1. Data Sources:
   1. AWS CloudWatch
   2. Prometheus
   3. Prometheus AlertManager
   4. Zabbix (via plugin)
   5. Elasticsearch
   6. Jaeger
2. Dashboards:
   1. AWS EC2 (based on CloudWatch)
   2. Prometheus Pod (based on Prometheus)
   3. Linux Server (based on Zabbix)
   4. App Log Quick Search (based on Elasticsearch)
3. Explore:
   1. Jaeger
4. Alerting
5. Seamless Visualization and Navigation:
   1. Navigating from Logs (Elasticsearch) to Traces (Jaeger)

Stay tuned~