Grafana

Grafana is a tool for visualizing and monitoring your application’s data.

The easiest mental model is:

Grafana = a dashboard for your monitoring data.

Example

Your application produces metrics:

CPU usage:       72%
Memory usage:    4.2 GB
Requests/sec:    850
Error rate:      2.3%
Response time:   180 ms

Grafana can turn these into dashboards:

┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
│        Application Dashboard         │
├──────────────┬──────────────┬────────┤
│ CPU          │ Memory       │ Errors │
│   72%        │   4.2 GB     │  2.3% │
├──────────────┴──────────────┴────────┤
│ Requests/sec                         │
│     /\      /\                       │
│ ___/  \____/  \___                   │
├──────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Response time                        │
│ 120ms ───────── 180ms ─── 250ms      │
└──────────────────────────────────────┘

Grafana doesn’t usually collect the data itself

It connects to data sources.

For example:

Application
    │
    ├── metrics ──────► Prometheus
    │                      │
    │                      ▼
    │                   Grafana
    │
    ├── logs ─────────► OpenSearch
    │                      │
    │                      ▼
    │                   Grafana
    │
    └── traces ───────► Tempo/Jaeger
                           │
                           ▼
                        Grafana

So:

• OpenTelemetry → collects/instruments telemetry.

• Prometheus → commonly stores metrics.

• OpenSearch → stores/searches logs.

• Jaeger/Tempo → stores traces.

• Grafana → visualizes and queries these sources.

Grafana can also do alerts

For example:

IF
error_rate > 5%
FOR
5 minutes
 
THEN
send alert

You could get:

🚨 API error rate is above 5%.

The big picture

For the monitoring concepts you’ve been asking about:

                 Your Application
                       │
                 OpenTelemetry
                       │
          ┌────────────┼────────────┐
          ▼            ▼            ▼
        Logs        Metrics       Traces
          │            │            │
          ▼            ▼            ▼
     OpenSearch    Prometheus   Tempo/Jaeger
          │            │            │
          └────────────┼────────────┘
                       ▼
                    Grafana
                       │
                       ▼
             Dashboards + Alerts

In one sentence: Grafana is the visualization and monitoring interface where you look at your application’s logs, metrics, traces, and alerts.

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