Introduction
Grafana is an open-source analytics and observability platform used for visualizing time-series data, building interactive dashboards, and monitoring metrics across complex systems.
Grafana serves as the primary metrics visualization layer, enabling engineers to explore performance data from Prometheus, trace and log systems, databases, and cloud infrastructure—all in a centralized, customizable UI. It plays a critical role in monitoring application health, investigating incidents, and aligning teams around operational and business KPIs.
Key benefits of using Grafana include:
Custom Dashboards and Panels: Supports rich visualizations such as graphs, heatmaps, gauges, and tables to monitor APIs, ML models, pipelines, and infrastructure.
Multi-Source Data Integration: Connects to a wide range of backends including Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Postgres, and more—creating a unified observability hub.Alerting and Notifications: Allows teams to define alert rules and thresholds directly from visual panels, with native integrations for Slack, PagerDuty, and Opsgenie.
Templating and Variable Support: Enables dynamic dashboards that can be filtered by cluster, service, model, or environment—ideal for multi-tenant and multi-region monitoring.
Collaboration and Sharing: Dashboards can be shared across teams, embedded in internal tools, or used in on-call rotations and postmortems to drive shared understanding.
Grafana is used to monitor critical systems such as model inference latency, Kubernetes health, experiment performance, CI/CD pipelines, and real-time platform usage. It acts as the front-end layer to Prometheus, DataHub metrics, and tracing systems like OpenTelemetry—offering a complete view of system behavior over time. By adopting Grafana, you can ensure that metrics and insights are accessible, actionable, and transparent—empowering teams to operate services reliably and respond to anomalies with clarity and speed.