Grafana — Open Source Data Visualization & Observability

What it is

Grafana is the leading open-source platform for monitoring, observability, and data visualization. It connects to virtually any data source -- Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Loki, and over 100 more -- and transforms raw metrics, logs, and traces into interactive dashboards.

Grafana is built for SREs, DevOps engineers, and data teams who need unified visibility across infrastructure, applications, and business metrics.

How it saves time or tokens

Grafana provides a single pane of glass for all your observability data. Instead of switching between Prometheus for metrics, Elasticsearch for logs, and Jaeger for traces, you query all of them from one dashboard. Alerting rules trigger notifications across Slack, PagerDuty, email, and webhooks, reducing the time from anomaly detection to response.

How to use

1. Start Grafana with Docker:

docker run -d --name grafana -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana-oss:latest

1. Open http://localhost:3000 and login with admin/admin
2. Add a data source (Prometheus, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, etc.)
3. Create a dashboard and add panels with queries

Example

{
  "dashboard": {
    "title": "API Performance",
    "panels": [
      {
        "title": "Request Rate",
        "type": "timeseries",
        "targets": [
          {
            "expr": "rate(http_requests_total[5m])",
            "legendFormat": "{{method}} {{path}}"
          }
        ]
      },
      {
        "title": "P99 Latency",
        "type": "timeseries",
        "targets": [
          {
            "expr": "histogram_quantile(0.99, rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))"
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Related on TokRepo

• Monitoring tools — observability and monitoring resources
• DevOps tools — infrastructure management tools

Common pitfalls

• Creating too many panels per dashboard, which slows down loading and makes it hard to scan
• Not setting appropriate time ranges for queries, leading to excessive data retrieval
• Using Grafana as a long-term data store instead of configuring proper retention in the underlying data source