What is Grafana?

Grafana is an open source interactive data-visualization platform, developed by Grafana Labs, which allows users to see their data via charts and graphs that are unified into one dashboard (or multiple dashboards!) for easier interpretation and understanding. You can also query and set alerts on your information and metrics from wherever that information is stored, whether that’s traditional server environments, Kubernetes clusters, or various cloud services, etc. You’re then more easily able to analyze the data, identify trends and inconsistencies, and ultimately make your processes more efficient. Grafana was built on open principles and the belief that data should be accessible throughout an organization, not just to a small handful of people. This fosters a culture where data can be easily found and used by anyone who needs it, empowering teams to be more open, innovative, and collaborative.

Grafana’s dashboards give a new level of meaning to data collected from various sources. Those dashboards can then be shared with other team members and other teams, allowing collaboration and more extensive exploration of the data and its implications. Build dashboards specifically for you and your team and customize your panels to create the visualizations you want, using advanced querying and transformation capabilities.

Understanding all relevant data and data relationships is vital when trying to find the cause for an incident or unexpected system behavior as quickly as possible. Grafana allows for seamless visualization and movement of data between teams and team members so that they can get to the root of a problem quickly and solve it. 

Insights from Grafana dashboards can be shared:

• Across a company—even to coworkers who aren’t Grafana users themselves. 
• Across the Grafana community, anywhere in the world
• Wherever you go: you can see your dashboards on all of your devices wherever you are.

Key features

• Panels: visualize your data any way you want using histograms, graphs, geomaps, heatmaps, etc.
• Plugins: Render your data in real time on a user-friendly API via panel plugins that hook into existing data sources—no data migration required. You can also create data source plugins, retrieving metrics from any custom API.
• Alerts: One user interface lets you create, consolidate, and control all your alerts.
• Transformations: Rename, summarize, combine, and perform calculations across data sources and queries.
• Annotations: Use rich events from different data sources to annotate graphs.
• Panel Editor: A consistent user interface for configuring and customizing your panels.

As an independent software vendor (ISV), Grafana offers 3 different levels of management to suit the flexible needs of growing businesses. 

1. Grafana Cloud
2. Grafana Enterprise Stack
3. Grafana OnCall
    

Grafana Cloud incorporates the features of Grafana’s visualization capabilities with full-stack monitoring via Grafana’s Prometheus-inspired agent, a unified view across instances for enterprises already running Prometheus, Loki, or Graphite, and automatic security patches and updates. Grafana Cloud handles the details of scalability and availability so your teams can focus on development and innovation.
 

Grafana Enterprise Stack offers all the pieces to compose and scale the observability of your data—on your infrastructure. You get better performance, more flexible scalability, increased collaboration and more efficient operations in a self-managed environment. You’ll also have enhanced access to:

Enterprise logs: log indexing for easier analyzation of logs securely and at scale

Enterprise metrics: A self-managed, scalable Prometheus service, supported by Grafana Labs

Enterprise traces: Self-managed tracing that connects logs and metrics with traces.
 

Grafana OnCall is a flexible on-call management tool that helps reduce hands-on work through simple workflows, as-needed assistance, and interfaces that are specifically designed for engineers and developers. Easily create and manage on-call schedules and automate escalations with a responsive and intuitive API. And only pay for users who are actively using Grafana OnCall. 

Red Hat includes open source Grafana visualization capabilities in multiple Red Hat products. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux + Grafana

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a great foundation for collecting performance metrics and visualizing them, with the help of Grafana dashboards and Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), a system performance analysis toolkit. By combining the preloaded Grafana dashboards with the remote logging capabilities of PCP, you can aggregate real-time and historic data from a variety of hosts into a single view for analysis and troubleshooting.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console provides an enhanced performance metrics page to help identify potential causes of high CPU, memory, disk, and network resource usage spikes. Easily export these metrics to a Grafana server, and access performance data after hours and during on-call situations to view system logs, monitor system health, troubleshoot and resolve issues.

Red Hat OpenShift + Grafana

Red Hat OpenShift administrators often face the same challenges as other system administrators in that they need to monitor the overall health of their system. Traditional monitoring tools often fall short in their visibility of a Red Hat OpenShift cluster. Thus, a typical Red Hat OpenShift monitoring stack includes Prometheus for monitoring both systems and services, and Grafana for analyzing and visualizing metrics.

Red Hat Virtualization + Grafana

As an administrator, it can be difficult to get the right level of visibility across your infrastructure. With the Red Hat Virtualization monitoring portal and Grafana dashboards, you can understand your data, identify problems early, utilize your resources efficiently and much more.

The portal includes 20 dashboards, and at least 150 panels to monitor the Red Hat Virtualization environment. Find more information about how to configure and use Grafana in Visualize and Monitor the Red Hat Virtualization Environment with Grafana. 

Save time and resources by identifying and addressing inefficiencies and high overcommit rates, more clearly assess your storage needs, optimize your workload schedule and more with Red Hat Virtualization and Grafana.