Overview
Grafana is the leading open-source platform for monitoring and observability, turning your time-series data into beautiful, interactive dashboards and visualizations. Grafana connects to dozens of data sources including Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, MySQL, CloudWatch, and many more, allowing you to query, visualize, alert, and explore your metrics, logs, and traces from a single interface. Whether you're monitoring infrastructure, applications, IoT devices, or business metrics, Grafana provides the tools to create stunning dashboards that help you understand your data at a glance.
Key Features
Multi-Data Source Support
Query Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, CloudWatch, and 100+ more
Beautiful Dashboards
Rich visualization library with graphs, gauges, heatmaps, tables, and custom panels
Alerting & Notifications
Flexible alerting with Slack, PagerDuty, email, webhooks, and more
Explore & Query
Ad-hoc queries and log exploration with intuitive query builders
Templating & Variables
Dynamic dashboards that adapt to different environments and filters
Plugins & Extensions
Extensive plugin ecosystem for data sources, panels, and applications
Uzkazoj
• Infrastructure monitoring (servers, containers, Kubernetes)
• Application performance monitoring (APM)
• IoT and sensor data visualization
• Business analytics and KPI dashboards
• Log aggregation and analysis
• Network monitoring and traffic analysis
• Database performance monitoring
Installation Guide
**Ubuntu Installation:**
```bash
# Add APT repository
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https software-properties-common
sudo wget -q -O /usr/share/keyrings/grafana.key https://apt.grafana.com/gpg.key
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/grafana.key] https://apt.grafana.com stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/grafana.list
# Install
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grafana
# Start service
sudo systemctl start grafana-server
sudo systemctl enable grafana-server
# Access at http://localhost:3000
# Default login: admin/admin
```
**Docker Installation:**
```bash
docker run -d --name=grafana -p 3000:3000 \
-v grafana-storage:/var/lib/grafana \
grafana/grafana-oss:latest
```
**Docker Compose (with Prometheus):**
```yaml
version: '3'
services:
grafana:
image: grafana/grafana-oss:latest
ports:
- "3000:3000"
environment:
- GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin
- GF_INSTALL_PLUGINS=grafana-clock-panel
volumes:
- grafana-data:/var/lib/grafana
prometheus:
image: prom/prometheus:latest
ports:
- "9090:9090"
volumes:
- ./prometheus.yml:/etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml
- prometheus-data:/prometheus
volumes:
grafana-data:
prometheus-data:
```
Configuration Tips
**grafana.ini Configuration:**
```ini
[server]
http_port = 3000
domain = grafana.yourdomain.com
root_url = https://grafana.yourdomain.com
[database]
type = postgres
host = localhost:5432
name = grafana
user = grafana
password = password
[security]
admin_user = admin
admin_password = secure_password
[smtp]
enabled = true
host = smtp.gmail.com:587
user = your-email@gmail.com
password = your-app-password
from_address = grafana@yourdomain.com
```
**Add Prometheus Data Source (API):**
```bash
curl -X POST http://admin:password@localhost:3000/api/datasources \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"name": "Prometheus",
"type": "prometheus",
"url": "http://localhost:9090",
"access": "proxy",
"isDefault": true
}'
```
**Dashboard JSON (Simple CPU Dashboard):**
```json
{
"dashboard": {
"title": "CPU Monitoring",
"panels": [{
"title": "CPU Usage",
"type": "graph",
"targets": [{
"expr": "100 - (avg(irate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode=\"idle\"}[5m])) * 100)"
}]
}]
}
}
```
**Best Practices:**
- Use folders to organize dashboards
- Implement dashboard variables for flexibility
- Set up alerting rules with proper thresholds
- Use PostgreSQL/MySQL in production (not SQLite)
- Enable HTTPS with reverse proxy (Nginx/Caddy)
- Configure authentication (OAuth, LDAP, SAML)
- Regular backups of dashboards and config
- Monitor Grafana itself with Prometheus