Grafana is an open-source monitoring and analytics platform for Kubernetes that allows you to query metrics, such as from Prometheus, visualize them, and send alerts, regardless of where these data are stored.
Some useful features of Grafana include:
Data visualization: Grafana offers a powerful and flexible tool to create and view dashboards, where data from various sources can be displayed in different formats, including graphs, tables, heatmaps, and more. This helps you understand complex data at a glance.
Support for multiple data sources: Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Graphite, and many others. This means you can use Grafana to visualize data from virtually any database or monitoring system.
Alerts: Like Prometheus, Grafana also has a powerful alerting feature. You can create alerts based on your data and have notifications sent via various methods, including email, Slack, and PagerDuty.
Annotations and events: Grafana allows you to annotate your graphs with event data. This can be useful for correlating data events over time.
Ad-hoc filters: These allow you to create new key/value filters while exploring your data. This can be very useful.
Integration with Prometheus and Kubernetes: Grafana works exceptionally well with Prometheus and Kubernetes. You can use Prometheus as a data source, and Grafana can visualize the metrics that Prometheus collects from a Kubernetes cluster.
Community and ecosystem: Grafana has a large and active community that contributes to its ongoing improvement and offers a wealth of plugins and dashboards.
In simple terms, Grafana is like the 'dashboard' of your car. It gives you a quick and easy-to-understand view of your data. When used together with a monitoring system like Prometheus, it can provide you with comprehensive insights into the status and performance of your applications and infrastructure.