Introduction to Grafana | What is Grafana | Grafana Features

In this Article we are going to learn Introduction to Grafana, Grafana Introduction, What is Grafana, Features of Grafana,Grafana OSS,Grafana Enterprise,Grafana Enterprise Features and Grafana Cloud.

What is Grafana?

  • Grafana is a free and open source visualization tool mostly used with Prometheus to which monitor metrics.
  • Grafana provides various dashboards, charts, graphs, alerts for the particular data source.
  • Grafana allows us to query, visualize, explore metrics and set alerts for the data source which can be a system, server, nodes, cluster, etc.
  • We can also create our own dynamic dashboard for visualization and monitoring.
  • we have covered what is Grafana.

Why we use Grafana?

  • Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.

Features of Grafana

  1. Alerts

If you’re using Grafana Alerting, then you can have alerts sent through a number of different alert notifiers, including PagerDuty, SMS, email, VictorOps, OpsGenie, or Slack.

Alert hooks allow you to create different notifiers with a bit of code if you prefer some other channels of communication. Visually define alert rules for your most important metrics.

  1. Annotations

Annotate graphs with rich events from different data sources. Hover over events to see the full event metadata and tags.

This feature, which shows up as a graph marker in Grafana, is useful for correlating data in case something goes wrong. You can create the annotations manually just control-click on a graph and input some text or you can fetch data from any data source. 

3. Authentication

Grafana supports different authentication methods, such as LDAP and OAuth, and allows you to map users to organizations. 

In Grafana Enterprise, you can also map users to teams: If your company has its own authentication system, Grafana allows you to map the teams in your internal systems to teams in Grafana. That way, you can automatically give people access to the dashboards designated for their teams.

4. Provisioning

While it’s easy to click, drag, and drop to create a single dashboard, power users in need of many dashboards will want to automate the setup with a script. You can script anything in Grafana.

For example, if you’re spinning up a new Kubernetes cluster, you can also spin up a Grafana automatically with a script that would have the right server, IP address, and data sources preset and locked in so users cannot change them. It’s also a way of getting control over a lot of dashboards.

5. Permissions

When organizations have one Grafana and multiple teams, they often want the ability to both keep things separate and share dashboards. You can create a team of users and then set permissions on folders and dashboards, and down to the data source level if you’re using Grafana Enterprise.

Grafana OSS

  • Grafana open source software enables you to query, visualize, alert on, and explore your metrics, logs, and traces wherever they are stored. Grafana OSS provides you with tools to turn your time-series database (TSDB) data into insightful graphs and visualizations.
  • After you have installed Grafana and set up your first dashboard using instructions in Getting started with Grafana, you will have many options to choose from depending on your requirements.

Grafana Enterprise

  • Grafana Enterprise is a commercial edition of Grafana that includes additional features not found in the open source version.
  • Building on everything you already know and love about Grafana open source, Grafana Enterprise includes exclusive datasource plugins and additional features.

Grafana Enterprise Features

Grafana Enterprise adds the following features:

  • Role-based access control to control access with role-based permissions.
  • Data source permissions to restrict query access to specific teams and users.
  • Data source query caching to temporarily store query results in Grafana to reduce data source load and rate limiting.
  • Reporting to generate a PDF report from any dashboard and set up a schedule to have it emailed to whomever you choose.
  • Export dashboard as PDF
  • Custom branding to customize Grafana from the brand and logo to the footer links.
  • Usage insights to understand how your Grafana instance is used.
  • Recorded queries to see trends over time for your data sources.
  • Vault integration to manage your configuration or provisioning secrets with Vault.
  • Auditing tracks important changes to your Grafana instance to help you manage and mitigate suspicious activity and meet compliance requirements.
  • Request security makes it possible to restrict outgoing requests from the Grafana server.
  • Settings updates at runtime allows you to update Grafana settings at runtime without requiring a restart.

Grafana Cloud

  • Grafana Cloud is a highly available, fast, fully-managed OpenSaaS logging and metrics platform. It is everything you love about Grafana, hosted by Grafana Labs.
  • Grafana Cloud and get started with your free account with Grafana Cloud that includes a robust free tier with access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces, two-week data retention, and three users.

We have covered What is Grafana, Grafana Introduction.

Conclusion:

We have covered Introduction to Grafana, Grafana Introduction, What is Grafana, Features of Grafana,Grafana OSS,Grafana Enterprise,Grafana Enterprise Features and Grafana Cloud

Related Articles:

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Reference:

Grafana official documentation page

Shweta Mamidwar

I am Shweta Mamidwar working as a Intern in Product Company. Likes to share knowledge.

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