The Simplest Introduction to Grafana
If you are googling for Grafana, chances are you are looking for a solution to collect data points and visualize them, e.g., for server or infrastructure monitoring, application tracking, etc.
You will quickly get sucked into the alphabet soup of monitoring software, such as Graphite, Carbon, Whisper, Prometheus, Cortex, etc., which is hard to untangle. This article will be the shortest article on introducing and explaining what Grafana is.
What is Grafana?
A dashboard. FULL STOP.
However a dashboard ON ITS OWN has no use.
What is a dashboard for?
A dashboard’s main purpose is to:
…visualize
…data points.
Dashboard Needs Visualization
You can visualize data points in many ways: tables, line graphs, bar charts, heat maps, scatter plots, etc. The keyword here is many types of visualizations.
Dashboard Needs Data Points
For visualization, you need data points. Data points comes from many sources, e.g., servers, hand-held devices, sensors, web applications, etc., and data points are kept in many different stores in many different formats, e.g., transactional databases, time-series databases, etc. The keyword here is many types of data stores.
What Grafana Really Is…
… a dashboard with an ecosystem of plugins
The folks developing Grafana cannot create all the different visualizations AND the connectors for all the different data stores because:
- It requires way too much time and effort to develop and maintain them
- Grafana will be HUUUGGEEEE if it included all the code to do these
Like all things Internet, Grafana rally the support of its community to build a plugin ecosystem.
Any developer can create a unique visualization or a data store connector for Grafana!
Thus if you go to the Grafana Plug-Ins page, you will see a mix plug-ins that are listed as ‘Panel’ (another term for visualization), ‘Data Source’ (another term for data store) & ‘App’.
‘App’ is something that I did not cover yet; it is actually a form of enhanced ‘data store’; it usually requires credential to your account of a web service, so that Grafana can interact with the web service to extract data points or even configure the web service so that the web service can produce data points for visualization.
Setting up Grafana can be hard. If you just want to play around with it, hop over to Metricfire, which provides hosted Grafana.
