Grafana – Open Source Analytics and Visualization Platform

What is Grafana?

Grafana is the open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application that has become the industry standard for monitoring dashboards. Founded by Torkel Ödegaard in 2014, Grafana enables users to query, visualize, alert on, and understand metrics from multiple data sources through beautiful, customizable dashboards.

Whether you are monitoring infrastructure, applications, or business metrics, Grafana provides the flexibility to create dashboards that tell the story of your data in a meaningful way.

Key Features

• Unified data visualization: Connect to virtually any data source and visualize data in one place
• Flexible dashboards: Create dynamic, reusable dashboards with templating and variables
• Advanced alerting: Define alert rules and get notified via email, Slack, PagerDuty, and more
• Explore mode: Ad-hoc query interface for troubleshooting and data exploration
• Annotations: Mark events and correlate them with metrics
• Plugin ecosystem: Extend functionality with hundreds of community plugins
• Team collaboration: Share dashboards and organize by folders and teams
• LDAP/OAuth integration: Enterprise authentication support

Supported Data Sources

Grafana supports a wide variety of data sources out of the box:

• Prometheus
• InfluxDB
• Elasticsearch
• MySQL and PostgreSQL
• Graphite
• Loki (for logs)
• AWS CloudWatch
• Azure Monitor
• Google Cloud Monitoring
• And 100+ more via plugins

System Requirements

• Minimum 255MB RAM
• 1 CPU core
• Supported databases: SQLite (default), MySQL, PostgreSQL
• Modern web browser for dashboard access
• Linux, Windows, macOS, or Docker

Installation Guide

debian">Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https software-properties-common wget
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings/
wget -q -O - https://apt.grafana.com/gpg.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg > /dev/null
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/grafana.gpg] https://apt.grafana.com stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grafana

# Start and enable
sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
sudo systemctl start grafana-server

rhel-fedora">CentOS/RHEL/Fedora

cat > /etc/yum.repos.d/grafana.repo << EOF
[grafana]
name=grafana
baseurl=https://rpm.grafana.com
repo_gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://rpm.grafana.com/gpg.key
sslverify=1
sslcacert=/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
EOF

sudo dnf install grafana
sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
sudo systemctl start grafana-server

Using Docker

docker run -d \
  --name=grafana \
  -p 3000:3000 \
  -v grafana-storage:/var/lib/grafana \
  grafana/grafana-oss

Initial Configuration

1. Access Grafana at http://localhost:3000
2. Default credentials: admin/admin
3. Change the admin password when prompted
4. Add your first data source under Configuration > Data Sources
5. Create your first dashboard or import from the community

Creating Your First Dashboard

# Example: Connecting to Prometheus
1. Go to Configuration > Data Sources
2. Click "Add data source"
3. Select "Prometheus"
4. Enter URL: http://localhost:9090
5. Click "Save & Test"

# Create a new dashboard
1. Click "+" > Dashboard
2. Add a new panel
3. Write your query in the query editor
4. Configure visualization options
5. Save the dashboard

Popular Dashboard Templates

Import pre-built dashboards from the Grafana community:

• Node Exporter Full (ID: 1860): Comprehensive Linux server monitoring
• Docker Dashboard (ID: 893): Container metrics visualization
• Kubernetes Cluster (ID: 315): K8s cluster overview
• NGINX Dashboard (ID: 12708): Web server metrics

Alerting Configuration

# Example alert rule for high CPU
1. Edit a panel with CPU metric
2. Go to Alert tab
3. Create alert rule:
   - Name: High CPU Usage
   - Condition: WHEN avg() OF query(A) IS ABOVE 80
   - Evaluate every: 1m
   - For: 5m
4. Configure notification channel
5. Save

Download

Grafana is available in two editions: OSS (open-source) and Enterprise. Download the version that fits your needs:

Download Grafana

Latest Version: 10.2.2
License: AGPL-3.0 (OSS)
Developer: Grafana Labs