# Grafana — Open Source Data Visualization & Observability

> Grafana is the leading open-source platform for monitoring and observability. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, and 100+ data sources.

## Install

Save as a script file and run:

## Quick Use

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

Open `http://localhost:3000` — login with admin/admin and start building dashboards.

## Intro

**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 100+ more — and transforms raw metrics, logs, and traces into beautiful, interactive dashboards.

With 73.1K+ GitHub stars and AGPL-3.0 license, Grafana is the industry standard for observability dashboards, used by millions of users from hobbyists monitoring home servers to enterprises running thousands of production services.

## What Grafana Does

- **Dashboards**: Build interactive dashboards with 50+ panel types (graphs, gauges, tables, heatmaps, maps)
- **Data Sources**: Connect 100+ data sources including Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Loki, Tempo, and cloud services
- **Alerting**: Define alert rules, notification channels (Slack, PagerDuty, email), and escalation policies
- **Explore**: Ad-hoc query interface for investigating metrics and logs in real-time
- **Annotations**: Mark events on graphs (deploys, incidents, changes) for correlation
- **Variables**: Template variables for dynamic, reusable dashboards
- **Provisioning**: Infrastructure-as-code dashboard and datasource management via YAML/JSON

## Architecture

```
┌──────────────┐     ┌──────────────┐     ┌──────────────┐
│  Browser     │────▶│  Grafana     │────▶│  Data Sources│
│  Dashboard   │     │  Server (Go) │     │  Prometheus  │
└──────────────┘     └──────────────┘     │  InfluxDB    │
                                          │  Elasticsearch│
                                          │  PostgreSQL  │
                                          │  Loki (Logs) │
                                          │  Tempo (Traces)│
                                          └──────────────┘
```

## Self-Hosting

### Docker Compose with Prometheus

```yaml
services:
  grafana:
    image: grafana/grafana-oss:latest
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD: your-password
    volumes:
      - grafana-data:/var/lib/grafana
    depends_on:
      - prometheus

  prometheus:
    image: prom/prometheus:latest
    ports:
      - "9090:9090"
    volumes:
      - ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
      - prometheus-data:/prometheus

volumes:
  grafana-data:
  prometheus-data:
```

## Key Features

### Dashboard Panels

```
Available panel types:
├── Time Series — line/area/bar charts over time
├── Stat — single value with sparkline
├── Gauge — circular gauge with thresholds
├── Bar Chart — categorical comparisons
├── Table — tabular data with sorting/filtering
├── Heatmap — time-based density visualization
├── Geomap — geographic data on world map
├── Logs — log line viewer with search
├── Traces — distributed trace visualization
├── Node Graph — network topology
├── Canvas — custom layout with drag-and-drop
└── 40+ more community panels
```

### PromQL Example (Prometheus)

```promql
# CPU usage per container
rate(container_cpu_usage_seconds_total{namespace="production"}[5m]) * 100

# Request rate
sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) by (status_code)

# P99 latency
histogram_quantile(0.99, rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m]))

# Error rate percentage
sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m])) / sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) * 100
```

### Alerting

```yaml
# Alert rule example
groups:
  - name: critical
    rules:
      - alert: HighErrorRate
        expr: sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m])) / sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m])) > 0.05
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: "Error rate above 5%"
```

### Dashboard as Code

```json
{
  "dashboard": {
    "title": "My Dashboard",
    "panels": [
      {
        "title": "CPU Usage",
        "type": "timeseries",
        "datasource": "Prometheus",
        "targets": [
          {
            "expr": "rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode='idle'}[5m])",
            "legendFormat": "{{instance}}"
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}
```

## LGTM Stack (Full Observability)

Grafana Labs provides a complete open-source observability stack:

| Component | Purpose | Data Type |
|-----------|---------|-----------|
| **Grafana** | Visualization | Dashboards |
| **Loki** | Log aggregation | Logs |
| **Tempo** | Distributed tracing | Traces |
| **Mimir** | Metrics storage | Metrics |
| **Alloy** | Telemetry collector | Collection |

## Grafana vs Alternatives

| Feature | Grafana | Kibana | Datadog | New Relic |
|---------|---------|--------|---------|-----------|
| Open Source | Yes (AGPL-3.0) | Yes (Elastic) | No | No |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Data sources | 100+ | Elasticsearch | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Alerting | Built-in | Built-in | Built-in | Built-in |
| Pricing | Free (OSS) | Free (Basic) | $15/host/mo | $0.30/GB |

## 常见问题

**Q: Grafana 适合初学者吗？**
A: Grafana 本身的学习曲线不高——拖拽面板、选择数据源即可。难点在于理解数据源（如 Prometheus 的 PromQL 查询语言）。建议从导入社区 Dashboard 开始学习。

**Q: Grafana OSS 和 Grafana Cloud 有什么区别？**
A: OSS 是完全免费的自托管版本。Cloud 提供托管服务，免费层包含 10K 指标/50GB 日志/50GB 追踪。Cloud 还包含一些 OSS 没有的功能如 ML 驱动告警。

**Q: 可以嵌入到自己的应用中吗？**
A: 可以。Grafana 支持 iframe 嵌入和匿名访问配置。也可以使用 Grafana 的 API 获取面板截图。

## 来源与致谢

- GitHub: [grafana/grafana](https://github.com/grafana/grafana) — 73.1K+ ⭐ | AGPL-3.0
- 官网: [grafana.com](https://grafana.com)

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Source: https://tokrepo.com/en/workflows/ed1a524f-34ae-11f1-9bc6-00163e2b0d79
Author: Script Depot