What is Grafana, and how does it relate to Prometheus? [Intermediate]
Answer
Grafana is a visualization and dashboarding platform. Prometheus stores and queries metrics; Grafana connects to Prometheus and other data sources to build dashboards, panels, variables, and visual investigation workflows.
Technical explanation
Grafana is not usually the source of truth for metrics; the backend such as Prometheus, Mimir, Thanos, Loki, or Elasticsearch is.
Grafana adds dashboard organization, templating, annotations, alerting options, and cross-source visualization.
Good Grafana dashboards should reflect service ownership and incident workflows, not just random metric panels.
Hands-on example
Hands-on: add Prometheus as a Grafana data source. Create dashboard variables cluster, namespace, and service. Add panels for RPS, error ratio, p95 latency, saturation, and recent deploy annotations. Link each panel to logs or traces using service and trace_id where possible.
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