Grafana
Grafana is an open-source visualization and monitoring platform that creates interactive dashboards to display time-series metrics and data from various sources like Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Elasticsearch.
Grafana is a web-based application designed for visualizing, alerting on, and exploring metrics and logs. It pulls data from multiple backend data sources and presents it through customizable, interactive dashboards with graphs, gauges, tables, and heatmaps.
Common use cases include monitoring system performance (CPU, memory, disk), application metrics, cloud infrastructure, and Kubernetes clusters. For example, you might connect Prometheus as a data source to graph CPU usage over time and set up alerts when thresholds are exceeded.
Key features include role-based access control, templated dashboards for reuse, a large community plugin ecosystem, and built-in support for major monitoring stacks. Grafana runs as a containerized service and is widely deployed in production environments for observability.