Grafana

Grafana is an open source observability and data visualization platform for querying, visualizing, and alerting on metrics, logs, and traces across many backends. It provides interactive dashboards and exploration workflows so teams can monitor systems and troubleshoot issues from a single interface.

Key Features

• Dashboards with flexible visualizations and templating for reusable views
• Explore workflows for ad-hoc querying and drilldowns across time ranges and data sources
• Unified alerting with rule evaluation and multi-channel notifications
• Pluggable data source and panel ecosystem to integrate with many metrics, log, and trace systems
• Sharing and collaboration features for teams (dashboards, annotations, and permissions)

Use Cases

• Infrastructure and Kubernetes monitoring using time-series backends
• Centralized log exploration and correlation with metrics for incident response
• Application observability by visualizing traces and service performance trends

Limitations and Considerations

• The experience and capabilities depend heavily on the chosen data sources and plugins
• Operating at very large scale can require careful tuning of storage backends and dashboard/query design

Grafana is well-suited for organizations that want a single “pane of glass” across diverse telemetry sources. Its extensible plugin model and alerting make it a common foundation for observability stacks in both homelabs and enterprise environments.