What is Grafana?

 Grafana open source software enables you to query, visualize, alert on, and explore your metrics, logs, and traces wherever they are stored. Grafana OSS provides you with tools to turn your time-series database (TSDB) data into insightful graphs and visualizations .one of the biggest highlights of grifana is the ability to bring several data sources together in one dashboard with adding rows that will host individual panels that is each with visual type .

After you have installed Grafana and set up your first dashboard , you will have many options to choose from depending on your requirements.

For example, if you want to view weather data and statistics about your smart home, then you can create a playlist. If you are the administrator for an enterprise and are managing Grafana for multiple teams, then you can set up provisioning and authentication.

An overview of Grafana features 

Explore metrics, logs, and traces

Explore your data through ad-hoc queries and dynamic drilldown. Split view and compare different time ranges, queries and data sources side by side. Refer to Explore for more information.

Alerts

Alert hooks allow you to create different notifiers with a bit of code if you prefer some other channels of communication.

By using Grafana alerting, you can have alerts sent through a number of different notifiers, including PagerDuty, SMS, email, or Slack.

Annotations

which shows up as a graph marker in Grafana, is useful for correlating data in case something goes wrong. You can create the annotations manually—just control-click on a graph and input some text—or you can fetch data from any data source.

Configure Grafana

1. Kiosk mode and playlists: If you want to display your Grafana dashboards on a TV monitor, you can use the playlist feature to pick the dashboards that you or your team need to look at through the course of the day and have them cycle through on the screen. The kiosk mode hides all the user interface elements that you don't need in view-only mode. Helpful hint: The Grafana Kiosk utility handles logging in, switching to kiosk mode, and opening a playlist—eliminating the pain of logging in on a TV that has no keyboard.
2. Custom plugins: Plugins allow you to extend Grafana with integrations with other tools, different visualizations, and more. Some of the most popular in the community are Worldmap Panel (for visualizing data on top of a map), Zabbix (an integration with Zabbix metrics), and Influx Admin Panel (which offers other functionality like creating databases or adding users). But they're only the tip of the iceberg. Just by writing a bit of code, you can get anything that produces a timestamp and a value visualized in Grafana. Plus, Grafana Enterprise customers have access to more plugins for integrations with Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, and others.
3. Alerting and alert hooks: If you're using Grafana alerting, you can have alerts sent through a number of different notifiers, including PagerDuty, SMS, email, or Slack. Alert hooks allow you to create different notifiers with a bit of code if you prefer some other channels of communication.
4. Permissions and teams: When organizations have one Grafana and multiple teams, they often want the ability to both keep things separate and share dashboards. Early on, the default in Grafana was that everybody could see everyone else's dashboards, and that was it. Later, Grafana introduced multi-tenant mode, in which you can switch organizations but can't share dashboards. Some people were using huge hacks to enable both, so Grafana decided to officially create an easier way to do this. Now you can create a team of users and then set permissions on folders, dashboards, and down to the data source level if you're using Grafana Enterprise.
5. SQL data sources: Grafana's native support for SQL helps you turn anything—not just metrics—in an SQL database into metric data that you can graph. Power users are using SQL data sources to do a whole bunch of interesting things, like creating business dashboards that "make sense for your boss's boss," as the team at Percona put it. Check out their presentation at GrafanaCon.
6. Monitoring your monitoring: If you're serious about monitoring and you want to monitor your own monitoring, Grafana has its own Prometheus HTTP endpoint that Prometheus can scrape. It's quite simple to get dashboards and statics. There's also an enterprise version in development that will offer Google Analytics-style easy access to data, such as how much CPU your Grafana is using or how long alerting is taking.
7. Authentication: Grafana supports different authentication styles, such as LDAP and OAuth, and allows you to map users to organizations. In Grafana Enterprise, you can also map users to teams: If your company has its own authentication system, Grafana allows you to map the teams in your internal systems to teams in Grafana. That way, you can automatically give people access to the dashboards designated for their teams.      

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