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Grafana
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| Grafana | |
|---|---|
Screenshot of Grafana dashboard of a MusicBrainz server | |
| Developer | Grafana Labs |
| Stable release | 12.3.0[1]
/ 19 November 2025 |
| Repository | |
| Written in | Go and TypeScript |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOS |
| Type | Business intelligence |
| License | AGPL 3.0 |
| Website | grafana |
Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It can produce charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.
There is also a licensed Grafana Enterprise version with additional capabilities, which is sold as a self-hosted installation or through an account on the Grafana Labs cloud service.[2] It is expandable through a plug-in system. Complex monitoring dashboards[3] can be built by end users, with the aid of interactive query builders. The product is divided into a front end and back end, written in TypeScript and Go, respectively.[4]
As a visualization tool, Grafana can be used as a component in monitoring stacks,[5] often in combination with time series databases such as InfluxDB, Prometheus[6][7] and Graphite;[8] monitoring platforms such as Sensu,[9] Icinga, Checkmk,[10] Zabbix, Netdata,[7] and PRTG; SIEMs such as Elasticsearch,[6] OpenSearch,[11] and Splunk; and other data sources. The Grafana user interface was originally based on version 3 of Kibana.[12]
History
[edit]Grafana was first released in 2014 by Torkel Ödegaard as an offshoot of a project at Orbitz. It targeted time series databases such as InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, and Prometheus, but evolved to support relational databases such as MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server.[13]
In 2019, Grafana Labs secured $24 million in Series A funding.[14] In the 2020 Series B funding round it obtained $50 million.[15] In the 2021 Labs Series C funding round, Grafana secured $220 million.[16]
Grafana Labs acquired Kausal in 2018,[17] k6[18][19] and Amixr[20] in 2021, and Asserts.ai in 2023.[21]
Adoption
[edit]Grafana is used[5] in Wikimedia's infrastructure.[22] In 2017, Grafana had over 1000 paying customers, including Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase, and eBay.[18]
Licensing
[edit]Previously, Grafana was licensed with an Apache License 2.0 license and used a CLA based on the Harmony Contributor Agreement.[23]
Since 2021, Grafana has been licensed under an AGPLv3 license.[24] Contributors to Grafana need to sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) that gives Grafana Labs the right to relicense Grafana in the future. The CLA is based on The Apache Software Foundation Individual Contributor License Agreement.[25]
Related projects
[edit]Grafana Labs launched a series of related open-source projects to complement Grafana:
- Grafana Loki - a log aggregation platform inspired by Prometheus first made available in 2019[26]
- Grafana Mimir - a Prometheus-compatible, scalable metrics storage and analysis tool released in 2022 that replaced Cortex[27]
- Grafana Tempo - a distributed tracing tool, released in 2021[28]
- Grafana Pyroscope - a continuous profiling tool, released in 2023[29]
References
[edit]- ^ "Release 12.3.0". 19 November 2025. Retrieved 20 November 2025.
- ^ "Grafana Enterprise Stack". Grafana Labs. Retrieved 2021-03-19.
- ^ Perrin, Jim. "Monitoring Linux performance with Grafana". OpenSource.com. Retrieved 2018-08-14.
- ^ Synopsys. "The grafana Open Source Project on Open Hub: Languages Page". Open Hub. Retrieved 2021-03-19.
- ^ a b Anadiotis, George. "DevOps and observability in the 2020s". ZDNet. Retrieved 2020-02-04.
- ^ a b Jones, Anna (2019-01-25). "Open Source Monitoring Stack: Prometheus and Grafana". Bizety. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
- ^ a b DeLosSantos, Louis (2018). "Netdata, Prometheus, Grafana stack". Netdata Documentation. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
- ^ Assaraf, Ariel (6 July 2018). "Grafana Vs Graphite". Coralogix.
- ^ Kumar, Santhosh; Muruganantham, Logeshkumar (2017-01-21). "Step By Step: Install and Configure Sensu + Grafana". Powerupcloud Tech Blog. Archived from the original on May 8, 2019. Retrieved 2019-05-08.
- ^ "Exporting Check_MK Performance Data to Grafana". TruePath Technologies. 2018. Retrieved 2020-09-24.
- ^ "OpenSearch plugin for Grafana". Grafana Labs. Retrieved 2024-06-02.
- ^ Ödegaard, Torkel (2019-09-03). "The (Mostly) Complete History of Grafana UX". grafana.com. Retrieved 2020-10-06.
- ^ "MySQL data source | Grafana documentation". Grafana Labs. Retrieved 2024-04-23.
- ^ Anadiotis, George. "Is open source the way to go for observability? Grafana Labs scores $24M Series A funding to try to prove this". ZDNet. Retrieved 2020-02-04.
- ^ Grafana (2020-08-17). "Grafana Labs Raises $50 Million to Accelerate R&D Investments in Open Source Logs, Metrics and Composable Observability". GlobeNewswire News Room (Press release). Retrieved 2021-07-23.
- ^ Grafana (2021-08-24). "Grafana Labs Raises $220 Million Round at $3 Billion Valuation". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2021-08-22.
- ^ "Kausal to join Grafana Labs to bring Prometheus to the masses". Kausal.co. 2018-03-10. Retrieved 2024-05-27.
- ^ a b "Grafana Labs acquires load-testing startup K6". VentureBeat. 2021-06-17. Retrieved 2021-07-27.
- ^ "Grafana Labs Acquires k6 to Add Open Source Load Testing Tool - DevOps.com". devops.com. 17 June 2021. Retrieved 2021-07-27.
- ^ "Russian-founded incident management tool Amixr acquired by US major Grafana Labs". ewdn.com. 2021-11-12. Retrieved 2021-11-12.
- ^ "Grafana Labs acquires AI startup Asserts.ai to ease application observability headaches". siliconangle.com. 2023-11-14. Retrieved 2024-06-14.
- ^ "grafana.wikimedia.org". Wikitech. Retrieved 2021-04-09.
- ^ "Grafana Labs Contributor License Agreement". Retrieved 2021-01-22.
- ^ Dutt, Raj (2021-04-20). "Grafana, Loki, and Tempo will be relicensed to AGPLv3". grafana.com. Retrieved 2021-04-21.
- ^ "Grafana Labs Contributor License Agreement". grafana.com. 2021-04-20. Retrieved 2021-04-21.
- ^ Lobo, Savia (November 20, 2019). "Grafana Labs announces general availability of Loki 1.0, a multi-tenant log aggregation system". Packt Hub. Retrieved 19 April 2023.
- ^ Gain, B. Cameron (August 10, 2022). "The Great Grafana Mimir and Cortex Split". The New Stack. Retrieved 19 April 2023.
- ^ Deutscher, Maria (June 8, 2021). "Grafana Labs eases IT monitoring with Tempo tracing tool and new Grafana release". Silicon Angle. Retrieved 19 April 2023.
- ^ Vizard, Mike (August 31, 2023). "Grafana Labs Delivers Open Source Code Profiling Tool". DevOps.com. Retrieved 27 May 2024.
Grafana
View on GrokipediaOverview
Definition and Purpose
Grafana is a multi-platform open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application that facilitates the creation of charts, graphs, and alerts for monitoring and observability purposes.[1] It serves as a versatile tool for data exploration, allowing users to interact with time-series data in an intuitive manner across various operating systems and deployment environments.[7] The core purpose of Grafana is to enable users to query, visualize, alert on, and understand metrics, logs, and traces from diverse data sources through a unified interface, thereby simplifying the process of gaining insights into system performance and behavior.[1] This integration supports a holistic approach to observability, where disparate data types can be correlated without the need for specialized silos.[10] Originally developed as a personal project by Torkel Ödegaard in 2013, Grafana has evolved into a composable observability platform that underpins full-stack monitoring for modern infrastructures.[4] Its basic workflow centers on connecting to data sources, constructing customizable dashboards, and configuring alerts, all accessible via a user-friendly web interface that minimizes the requirement for deep coding knowledge.[7]Key Use Cases
Grafana is widely employed for monitoring infrastructure and applications, enabling real-time visualization of server metrics, Kubernetes clusters, and cloud resources such as those from AWS, Azure, and GCP.[11] This use case supports comprehensive visibility into hybrid environments, where users can track resource utilization, network traffic, and system health through pre-built integrations and dashboards.[12] For instance, organizations monitor energy infrastructure or Kubernetes deployments to detect anomalies in pod performance and scaling events.[13] In DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) workflows, Grafana facilitates incident response, performance optimization, and tracking of CI/CD pipelines by correlating metrics, logs, and traces.[14] Teams leverage its alerting and exploration tools to perform root cause analysis, reducing mean time to resolution during outages.[15] Proactive optimization, such as addressing latency or memory hotspots, is common, with features like queryless exploration aiding in cost reduction and resource efficiency.[16] For business intelligence applications, Grafana visualizes diverse datasets including database queries, IoT sensor data, and financial metrics, extending beyond traditional observability to support internal analytics.[17] It enables interactive dashboards for tracking operational KPIs, such as supply chain flows or customer acquisition trends, often integrated with sources like PostgreSQL or InfluxDB.[18] Specific implementations highlight Grafana's versatility, such as end-to-end observability for microservices architectures, where companies like PayIt use it alongside Prometheus to monitor Kubernetes-based services at scale.[19] In blockchain networks, dashboards track node health, transaction throughput, and consensus metrics for platforms like Ethereum or Bitcoin.[20] E-commerce performance monitoring involves real-time dashboards for checkout flows and site latency, as seen in retail solutions that correlate frontend metrics with backend orders.[21] These applications yield benefits like faster issue detection through unified views, collaborative insight sharing via shareable dashboards, and cost-effective scaling for distributed teams.[14][16]History
Founding and Early Years
Grafana originated as a personal open-source project created by Norwegian developer Torkel Ödegaard in late 2013, with the goal of providing an intuitive interface for visualizing time-series data from monitoring tools. The project's first GitHub commit occurred on December 5, 2013, initially serving as a frontend dashboard for the Graphite metrics database, which Ödegaard used in his work at Orbitz. Drawing inspiration from Kibana's innovative approach to Elasticsearch data exploration, Ödegaard aimed to fill a gap in accessible graphing for time-series metrics, emphasizing ease of use over complex configurations.[4][22][23] Released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, the early versions of Grafana focused on seamless integrations with popular time-series databases such as Graphite and InfluxDB, allowing users to query, aggregate, and display metrics through customizable panels and dashboards. This design choice prioritized developer productivity, enabling quick setup without proprietary dependencies, and quickly attracted interest from the DevOps community for its lightweight, browser-based architecture. By mid-2014, the project had evolved from a solo hack into a viable tool, with Ödegaard maintaining active development through consistent GitHub commits.[24][22] In 2014, Ödegaard partnered with Raj Dutt and Anthony Woods to co-found Raintank Inc., a company dedicated to commercializing Grafana and ensuring its long-term sustainability through professional support and enterprise features. Renamed Grafana Labs in 2017 to better align with the project's prominence, the firm addressed the challenges of funding open-source initiatives in the emerging observability space, where demand for metrics visualization was rising but monetization models were unproven. Key early milestones included the April 2015 release of Grafana 2.0, the first stable version with a Go-based backend for enhanced performance and scalability. Community engagement surged on GitHub, with thousands of stars and contributions by 2016, while initial seed funding in 2015 and a Series A round in 2019 provided resources to scale development amid competition from established proprietary solutions. These efforts highlighted the difficulties of bootstrapping open-source sustainability, relying on community momentum and strategic partnerships to navigate a market still maturing beyond basic logging tools.[22][25][26][27]Growth and Acquisitions
Grafana Labs experienced significant growth through multiple funding rounds that enabled global expansion and product development. In 2019, the company secured $24 million in Series A funding to support its early commercialization efforts. This was followed by a $50 million Series B round in 2020, which accelerated hiring and infrastructure scaling. The Series C funding of $220 million in 2021 further bolstered international operations and open source investments.[28] Subsequent rounds included a $240 million Series D in 2022 and a $270 million extension in 2024, contributing to a total of over $500 million raised and facilitating worldwide team growth to over 1,000 employees.[29][30] Key software releases marked Grafana's evolution toward comprehensive observability. Grafana 8, released in 2021, introduced unified alerting, consolidating alert management across data sources like Prometheus into a single system for improved efficiency.[31] Grafana 10 in 2023 enhanced trace handling with features like span filtering and correlations to profiles, enabling better distributed tracing analysis.[32] The latest major release, Grafana 12 in May 2025, added observability as code capabilities and dynamic dashboards for programmatic configuration and real-time adaptability.[33] Strategic acquisitions expanded Grafana's ecosystem, with a total of six by 2025 focusing on complementary technologies. In 2018, Grafana acquired Kausal to integrate managed Prometheus services into Grafana Cloud, enhancing cloud-native monitoring. The 2021 acquisitions of k6 for load testing and Amixr for incident response strengthened testing and alerting workflows. In 2023, the purchase of Pyroscope brought continuous profiling tools, which were merged into the open source Phlare project for performance optimization visualization.[34] Later that year, Asserts.ai was acquired to incorporate AI-driven incident management and dashboard automation.[35] In 2024, TailCtrl was acquired to advance adaptive trace sampling technologies.[36] Corporate developments underscored Grafana's shift to a SaaS model. Originally founded as Raintank in 2014, the company rebranded to Grafana Labs in 2017 to align with its flagship product and emphasize open source visualization.[37] In 2019, Grafana launched Grafana Cloud, a hosted service providing managed observability without infrastructure overhead, marking a pivot toward sustainable open source business practices.[37] The 2024 documentary series "The Story of Grafana" chronicled this trajectory, from its origins as a solo project to a community-driven platform serving 20 million users worldwide, highlighting the role of open source contributions in its expansion.[4]Features
Visualization and Dashboards
Grafana dashboards consist of composable layouts built from panels, which serve as the fundamental units for displaying data visualizations. Each panel combines a data query with a graphical representation, such as time-series graphs for tracking trends over time, heatmaps for density patterns, gauges for single-value metrics, and tables for tabular data. The time series panel supports advanced legend customization, allowing users to set the legend Mode to List or Table, Format to Custom, and enter a string using {{label}} placeholders for any labels present in the time series data. This is particularly useful when using PromQL binary operators with group_left (or group_right), which enable including additional labels from the "one" side in the result series, making them available for the custom legend format. For example, the PromQL queryrate(http_requests_total[5m]) * on (pod) group_left (pod_name) kube_pod_labels enriches the series with the pod_name label, enabling a custom legend format such as {{pod_name}} - {{pod}} to display the joined label in the legend. Panels can be arranged into rows to group related information logically, enhancing readability and focus on specific aspects of the dataset. Annotations allow users to add contextual markers, like vertical lines or icons, directly onto visualizations to highlight events or anomalies. Additionally, dashboard variables enable templating by allowing dynamic substitution of values, such as query parameters or data sources, which makes dashboards reusable across different environments. In 2025, Grafana introduced the ability to add custom static options to Query variables, enabling these variables to combine dynamically queried values from the data source with manually defined static options in the dropdown menu. To configure this feature, in the dashboard settings under Variables, add or edit a Query variable, configure the data source and query, then in the Static options section toggle on "Use static options". Users can then add custom options by entering a Value (used in queries) and Display text (shown in the dropdown) for each, and add more with "+ Add new option". This enhances templating flexibility by allowing a mix of dynamic and static choices.[2][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]
The platform supports a diverse array of built-in visualization types tailored to various data presentation needs. Stat panels are particularly useful for key performance indicators (KPIs), displaying single values with options for color coding and thresholds to emphasize critical metrics. Pie charts illustrate proportional distributions, segmenting data into slices that represent relative shares of a whole. Geomap visualizations handle spatial data, overlaying metrics on interactive world or regional maps to reveal geographic patterns. Other options include bar charts for comparisons and histograms for value distributions. In Grafana 12, released in May 2025, enhanced drilldown capabilities were introduced, enabling interactive exploration where users can seamlessly navigate from high-level overviews to detailed breakdowns of metrics, logs, or traces without writing additional queries.[45][46][47][33][48]
Dynamic features in recent versions further improve usability and adaptability. Grafana 12 introduced auto-grid layouts, which automatically adjust panel arrangements to optimize space and respond to different screen sizes, ensuring consistent viewing experiences across devices. Complementing this, observability as code tools, launched in 2025, allow programmatic management of dashboards through version control integration like Git sync and declarative configurations, enabling teams to treat dashboards as code artifacts for automated deployment and collaboration.[49][50][51]
Sharing and collaboration options facilitate broader access and teamwork. Dashboards can be exported in JSON format for import into other instances or as PDF reports for static distribution. Public snapshots generate shareable links to read-only versions of the dashboard at a specific time range, preserving data without exposing sensitive configurations. Team-based editing is supported through internal links that grant view, edit, or admin permissions within an organization.[52]
Best practices for effective dashboard design emphasize clarity and efficiency. Organizing panels into thematic rows helps users scan information quickly, reducing cognitive load during monitoring. Thresholds provide visual cues by applying color-coding—such as green for normal, yellow for warnings, and red for critical—to values in panels like gauges or stats, allowing immediate identification of issues without deep analysis.[53][54]
Data Querying and Sources
Grafana provides language-agnostic query editors that enable users to construct queries for various data sources using native query languages such as SQL for relational databases, PromQL for Prometheus metrics, and Lucene for Elasticsearch searches. In Grafana 12.2, released in September 2025, LLM-powered SQL expressions were introduced, offering an intuitive, AI-assisted experience for building and refining SQL queries.[55][56] These editors feature intuitive interfaces, including visual builders for complex queries and code modes for direct language input, allowing seamless adaptation across different backend systems.[57] Additionally, Grafana incorporates macros—dynamic placeholders like$__timeFilter for time ranges or $__interval for automatic resolution—that facilitate the creation of adaptive queries without hardcoding values.[58] These macros support transformations such as filtering by tags, aggregating over intervals, and parameterizing queries based on dashboard variables, enhancing reusability and performance in dynamic environments.[59]
Built-in functions in Grafana extend query capabilities beyond raw data retrieval, enabling time range selection through variables like $__from and $__to to specify query scopes in epoch milliseconds.[44] Downsampling is achieved via resolution-aware macros such as $__interval and $__rate_interval, which automatically adjust data granularity to prevent overload during visualization, particularly for long historical periods.[58] For correlated analysis, Grafana's transformation engine supports joining data from multiple sources or queries, using operations like "Join by field" to align metrics, logs, or traces on common dimensions such as timestamps or labels, thereby creating unified views without external processing.[60]
Grafana handles diverse data formats through dedicated support for metrics via Prometheus, which ingests time-series data for numerical analysis; logs via Loki, optimized for high-volume text-based event storage and querying; and traces via Tempo, which stores distributed tracing spans for latency investigation. In November 2025, Tempo received updates including AI-assisted tracing features to enhance span analysis and root-cause identification.[61][62] This integration aligns with OpenTelemetry standards, allowing standardized ingestion of telemetry data—metrics, logs, and traces—from instrumented applications, ensuring compatibility and correlation across observability signals.[63]
To optimize performance, Grafana employs query caching mechanisms, particularly in Grafana Cloud, where repeated queries are stored and reused to reduce latency by up to 79% for dashboard loads, as reported in 2021.[64] Backend query proxying further alleviates source load by routing requests through Grafana's HTTP API, which handles authentication, whitelisting, and forwarding to data sources while preventing direct exposure and enabling centralized control.[65] This proxy layer supports secure connections, such as SOCKS5 tunnels, for remote or restricted environments.[66]
In 2025, Grafana introduced enhanced drilldown features for seamless navigation across data types, with the general availability of Traces Drilldown in April, enabling direct correlation from trace spans to associated metrics in Prometheus and logs in Loki without additional queries.[67] Subsequent updates in May improved Metrics Drilldown with advanced filtering and UI enhancements for faster metric exploration, while October's Logs Drilldown redesign added JSON visualization and multi-line support, unifying the workflow for metrics, logs, and traces in Explore mode.[68][69] These advancements, announced at GrafanaCON 2025, streamline root-cause analysis by allowing queryless transitions between observability pillars.[70]
Alerting and Automation
Grafana introduced a unified alerting system in version 8.0, which consolidates alerting capabilities across Grafana and compatible data sources like Prometheus into a single, centralized interface for managing rules and notifications.[31] This system supports two types of alert rules: Grafana-managed rules, which query any supported backend data source and offer advanced features like richer expressions, and data source-managed rules, which are stored and evaluated directly in sources such as Prometheus or Mimir for optimized performance.[71] Alert rules are defined through one or more queries that retrieve time-series data, combined with expressions to process it, followed by conditions that trigger notifications—such as threshold breaches where a metric exceeds a specified value over time.[72] Evaluation occurs at configurable intervals, typically ranging from seconds to hours, allowing rules to poll data periodically and assess conditions against recent observations to determine alert states like normal, pending, firing, or resolved.[72] Notifications in Grafana Alerting are routed through contact points, which integrate with channels including email, Slack, PagerDuty, Microsoft Teams, and webhooks for custom endpoints.[73] Contact points can be customized with message templates using the Go templating language to include dynamic details like alert labels and annotations, and they support testing to verify delivery.[74] Notification policies then route alerts to appropriate contact points based on hierarchical matching of labels, enabling flexible escalation—such as directing critical alerts to on-call teams via PagerDuty while sending minor ones to email.[74] This routing reduces alert fatigue by ensuring notifications reach the right recipients without overwhelming teams. To automate responses and minimize noise, Grafana Alerting includes silencing rules that temporarily suppress notifications for specific alerts based on labels and time windows, as well as mute timings that pause evaluations during scheduled maintenance periods like off-hours or deployments.[75] The Alerting Provisioning HTTP API further enables programmatic management, allowing creation, updating, deletion, and provisioning of rules, contact points, and policies via endpoints that support JSON, YAML, or HCL formats, often integrated with tools like Terraform for infrastructure-as-code workflows.[76] In 2025, enhancements via Grafana Assistant introduced AI-assisted rule creation, where the tool uses natural language prompts to draft, validate, and optimize queries and conditions for alerts, streamlining setup for complex scenarios while ensuring compatibility with existing data sources.[77] Alert states transition dynamically: instances move to firing when conditions are met, remain pending during evaluation, and resolve automatically once thresholds are no longer breached.[71] Grouping consolidates related firing alerts into bundles based on shared labels defined in notification policies, while deduplication prevents redundant notifications for identical instances within a group, further reducing noise—alerts without matching labels fall into a default "no grouping" category.[78] For compliance and auditing, Grafana supports scheduled reporting of alert histories through dashboard snapshots, where users can configure automated emails containing rendered views of alert lists or timelines, capturing states and metadata at regular intervals like daily or weekly.[79]Extensibility through Plugins
Grafana's extensibility is primarily achieved through its plugin system, which enables users and developers to customize and expand the platform's functionality without modifying the core codebase. Plugins integrate seamlessly to add new data connections, visualizations, and even full applications, allowing Grafana to adapt to diverse monitoring and analytics needs across industries. This architecture promotes a modular design, where the community and third-party developers contribute to an ever-growing ecosystem of extensions. Grafana supports several types of plugins to cover different extension points. Panel plugins enable the creation of custom visualizations, such as specialized charts or maps, beyond the built-in options like graphs and tables. Data source plugins facilitate connections to external systems, including databases and APIs not natively supported, by defining query languages and data formats. App plugins provide comprehensive extensions that bundle panels, data sources, and dashboards into self-contained applications, often with custom navigation and configuration pages. Provisioning plugins assist in automating the management of resources like datasources and dashboards through declarative YAML files, streamlining deployments in large-scale environments.[80] Developing plugins involves the Grafana Plugin SDK, which offers tools in Go for backend components and TypeScript for frontend interfaces, ensuring compatibility with Grafana's architecture. Backend plugins are particularly useful for secure data access, as they run outside the main Grafana process and handle sensitive operations like authentication and querying without exposing credentials to the browser. Plugins must be signed using Grafana's verification system, which employs cryptographic signatures to confirm authenticity and integrity before installation, preventing the use of tampered or unsigned code in production setups. Developers can scaffold, build, and test plugins locally using the official CLI tools, with support for hot-reloading during development.[81][82][83] The official Grafana Plugins catalog serves as the central marketplace, hosting over 100 verified plugins categorized by type and maintainer level, including those from Grafana Labs and the community. Installation occurs via the Grafana UI under Administration > Plugins or through the CLI with commands likegrafana-cli plugins install <plugin-id>, supporting automatic updates and version pinning for stability. Plugins are versioned following semantic versioning, allowing users to roll back if needed, and the catalog provides metadata on compatibility with specific Grafana releases.[84][85]
Notable examples include community-developed ones such as the Machine Learning plugin for AI-powered anomaly detection in time-series data. These extensions demonstrate how plugins bridge Grafana with specialized tools, such as integrating with emerging AI frameworks or niche monitoring systems.[86]
Security is a core aspect of plugin extensibility, with measures like signature validation ensuring only trusted code loads, and the Plugin Frontend Sandbox isolating plugin JavaScript execution in a restricted iframe to mitigate cross-site scripting risks. Backend plugins further enhance isolation by proxying data through Grafana's server, avoiding direct client exposure. The Grafana Plugin Validator tool scans submissions for common vulnerabilities and best practices before catalog inclusion, reducing the attack surface in deployed instances.[83][87][88]
Technical Architecture
Core Components
Grafana's frontend is constructed using React, which powers the interactive user interface for creating and managing dashboards, panels, and visualizations. This framework facilitates a component-based architecture that supports real-time updates and modular extensions. Additionally, TypeScript is employed throughout the frontend codebase to ensure type safety, reducing runtime errors and improving developer productivity in building responsive designs that adapt to various screen sizes.[89] The backend server is implemented in Go, providing a high-performance foundation for handling core operations such as user authentication, HTTP API endpoints for resource management, and secure data proxying to external sources. This proxy mechanism allows the frontend to query diverse data backends without exposing sensitive credentials or dealing with cross-origin restrictions directly from the browser. Go's concurrency model enables efficient scaling of these services under load.[90][91] For storage, Grafana defaults to an embedded SQLite database to manage metadata like user sessions, dashboard configurations, and organization settings, making it suitable for lightweight installations. In production environments, it supports more robust options such as PostgreSQL version 12 or higher and MySQL 8.0 or higher to handle larger-scale deployments with better concurrency and reliability.[92] Key modules include the provisioning system, which automates the configuration of resources like data sources and dashboards through declarative YAML files, enabling version control and reproducibility across environments. Authentication is handled via integrations such as OAuth and LDAP, allowing seamless single sign-on with external identity providers. Role-based access control (RBAC) further secures the platform by defining granular permissions for users and teams on resources like folders and alerts.[93][94][95] In 2025, Grafana's architecture evolved toward greater modularity to support observability as code, incorporating tools for programmatic management of configurations and workflows to enhance automation. This update also integrated AI components, such as Grafana Assistant, an agentic LLM designed to assist with data exploration, incident response, and dashboard creation directly within the platform.[51][50][96]Deployment and Scalability
Grafana supports multiple installation methods to accommodate various environments, including Docker containers for quick and consistent deployment, Helm charts for Kubernetes orchestration, Debian (deb) or Red Hat (rpm) packages for Linux distributions, and standalone binary installations for Windows, macOS, or other systems.[92] The official Docker images provide a simple, quick, and consistent installation method that avoids OS-specific dependencies and configuration issues. Key benefits include easy deployment with a singledocker run command; portability across environments; isolation from the host system; support for persistent data via volumes or bind mounts; straightforward configuration via environment variables; easy pre-installation of plugins; and scalability, especially with Docker Compose or orchestration tools. This makes Docker ideal for development, testing, and production setups, particularly when reproducibility and minimal setup are priorities. For example, users can run Grafana with docker run -d -p 3000:3000 grafana/grafana.[97]
For Kubernetes, the official Helm chart simplifies deployment by handling resource provisioning, persistent volumes, and ingress configurations.[98]
High availability in Grafana is achieved through clustering multiple server instances behind a load balancer, sharing a common database backend like PostgreSQL or MySQL to ensure data consistency across nodes.[99] Horizontal scaling involves deploying additional Grafana instances that synchronize state via a shared storage layer, enabling the system to handle increased traffic without single points of failure; for example, a reverse proxy like NGINX distributes requests evenly among nodes.[99] This setup supports failover by configuring session affinity or sticky sessions at the load balancer level, ensuring uninterrupted access during node maintenance.[99]
Performance tuning focuses on optimizing resource utilization and query efficiency, including the implementation of caching layers for dashboard queries to reduce backend load times by up to 79% in high-traffic scenarios.[64] Administrators can configure query timeouts and resource limits in the grafana.ini file to prevent overload, such as setting query_timeout to limit long-running data source requests.[100] Enterprise features further enhance scalability for thousands of concurrent users by enabling advanced caching mechanisms and optimized rendering pipelines.[100]
Deployment options extend to cloud environments, where self-managed instances can be hosted on platforms like AWS or Google Cloud Platform using virtual machines or managed Kubernetes services.[101] Grafana Cloud offers a fully managed alternative, handling infrastructure scaling and maintenance, with hybrid setups allowing connections to self-hosted data sources.[101] As of 2025, organizations weigh single-tenant architectures for isolated, customizable environments against multi-tenant models in Grafana Cloud, which provide cost-efficient resource sharing while maintaining data isolation via tenant IDs.[102]
Security hardening involves enforcing TLS encryption for all communications, typically by generating certificates and configuring the server with protocol = https in the settings.[103] Reverse proxies like NGINX or Apache are recommended to terminate TLS and add layers such as rate limiting or IP whitelisting before traffic reaches Grafana.[104] Audit logging, available in Grafana Enterprise, records user actions and configuration changes to files or external systems, aiding compliance by capturing events like logins and dashboard modifications with timestamps and details.[105]
Ecosystem and Integrations
Supported Data Sources
Grafana supports a wide array of data sources, enabling users to connect to various time-series databases, logging systems, tracing backends, relational and NoSQL databases, and cloud monitoring services for comprehensive observability.[106] These built-in integrations allow Grafana to query and visualize data from external systems without requiring additional plugins for core functionality.[106]Metrics Sources
Grafana natively supports popular metrics backends such as Prometheus, which uses PromQL for querying time-series data; InfluxDB, leveraging Flux or InfluxQL query languages; and Graphite, with its own query syntax for historical metrics storage.[107] These integrations facilitate the ingestion and visualization of performance metrics from monitoring tools, with Prometheus being particularly optimized for Kubernetes environments.[107]Logs and Traces
For logs, Grafana integrates with Loki, a lightweight, index-efficient logging system that uses LogQL for querying structured and unstructured log data. In the traces domain, Tempo provides high-volume distributed tracing storage with native support for querying spans via its HTTP API, while Jaeger and Zipkin enable visualization of trace data from service meshes and microservices.[108] These capabilities allow correlation of logs and traces for full-stack observability, with Tempo designed for minimal dependencies in production setups.[108]Databases
Grafana connects to SQL databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL (and compatible systems like MariaDB), and Microsoft SQL Server, using standard SQL queries to extract relational data for dashboards.[109][110] For NoSQL, Elasticsearch integration supports Lucene-based queries for full-text search and analytics on semi-structured data. These database sources are essential for blending operational metrics with application data in unified views.Cloud Services
Cloud-native monitoring is covered through integrations with AWS CloudWatch for metrics, logs, and traces from AWS services; Azure Monitor for Microsoft Azure telemetry; and Google Cloud Monitoring for GCP metrics and alerts. These allow Grafana to pull hybrid and multi-cloud data directly, supporting over 100 total integrations including OpenTelemetry collectors for standardized telemetry, Kubernetes APIs for cluster metrics, and IoT platforms like MQTT for real-time device data.[106][111] Data source configuration in Grafana typically involves specifying a URL for the endpoint, such ashttp://localhost:9090 for Prometheus, along with authentication methods like basic auth, API tokens, or OAuth, and optional custom HTTP headers for advanced security.[112][113] Querying these sources follows patterns detailed in the data querying documentation, while Grafana-specific backends like Mimir extend metrics scalability.[106]