Data plays a major role in the success of any business. Businesses are always in constant need to find a platform that will help them in using the data to improve their efficiency. Grafana is one such tool that will allow users to organize their data. Analytics will help companies define their consumer behaviour. They can always find out about what their customers are doing. As you have landed on this article, you must be curious to know everything about Grafana. From how popular it is to how many companies are using it. No worries, stick till the end of this article to find out about all those details.
Let’s start with what is Grafana.
What is Grafana?
Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization software. This platform helps users turn their data into visualizations and graphs seamlessly. Yes! Irrespective of the place your data is stored you can query, visualize and explore it. Companies across the globe are using this platform to integrate all data sources into an organized view. As customers can’t always predict their future decisions, companies need a tool that will help them in digging deeper than surveys and find out more about their customer behaviours.
Why use Grafana?
Grafana is used by companies to monitor their log analytics and infrastructure to improve their operational efficiency. It is predominantly used to track the application behaviour, user behaviour, errors that frequently occur in the pre-prod environment, conceptual scenarios and different types of errors that occur using the relative data. This platform comes with a dashboard that makes it easy to track the users as it automates the collecting, viewing, and managing of the data. This data plays a pivotal role for developers, security analysts and product leaders in making important decisions. It converts the data into infographics making it easier to understand. The companies that use such database analytics and visualization tools will improve their efficiency, productivity and profits. Another important reason why the companies are using this project is that they can deploy it on-prem and not worry about handling their data over to third party companies for security reasons. If you are looking for managed Grafana services many companies are offering excellent services.
Here are a few features of Grafana that are helpful and impactful
Templating
The most effective feature of Grafana is that it helps users in creating dashboards that are repurposed for different occasions. These templates are not made for one specific scenario. Yes, with these templates the users can create different dashboards for different purposes. It helps the users in drilling down their data. Users can share the created dashboards across their teams in the organization. Also if you have created an excellent template for the dashboard of any most desired data source then contribute that to the community. The users can customize the dashboard according to their needs and use it. Having such ready-made dashboard templates saves time for the users as they can create different dashboards in less time they create.
Monitoring
Grafana allows its users to monitor its monitoring. Yes! You heard it right. This platform comes with its own Prometheus HTTP endpoint. The users can get all the statistics and dashboards that require. There is also an enterprise version in development that will provide more access to the data.
Annotations
Annotations are the graph maker feature in Grafana. It is especially useful for the correlation of data when anything goes wrong. The users can create these annotations manually. All they have to do is double-click on the information and enter the text or simply they can fetch the data from the respective data source. Usually, if you create the annotations around the release and if you find any errors after the release then you track back the time and check if the errors have occurred at the time of the release.
Alert hooks
All you need is a bit of coding to create different notifiers. The coding helps you in creating notifiers for different channels of communication that you prefer to use. The users can send alerts to different notifiers such as PagerDuty, email, Slacker or SMS.
Provisioning
As mentioned above the users can easily create a single dashboard. However, if the users need to create many dashboards at a time then they need to automate that set-up with a script. Fortunately, people can script anything and everything in Grafana. You can easily get control over your dashboards.
Permissions
If an organization has multiple teams and only one Grafana then they most likely want to keep both of them separated while sharing dashboards. Earlier, the major problem with Grafana was that anyone can see what is going on the dashboards. However, now it is not that way, it has introduced a multiple-tenant mode, through this they can switch organizations but not share. Now, the users can create specific teams for the users and then set specific permissions to the folders.
Plugins
Plugins will help you in integrating your Grafana with many other tools. Yes! Not only tools you can even integrate it with unusual visualizations and much more. The tools that you can integrate include the Worldmap panel, Influx Admin Panel, Zabbix and many more. However, if you think this is it then you are highly mistaken. With a little coding, the users can make the visualization that generates value in the Grafana. Also if the customers subscribe to Grafana they can get access to many other plugins.
Wrapping Up
As you have made it to the end of the article, you must have understood different details about Grafana. This open-source platform is being used by companies across the globe to get the most out of their data. Since 2013, the Grafana dashboards are helping businesses improve efficiency and productivity. This platform is easy to use, reliable and most importantly it is scalable. What are you waiting for? Give Grafana a chance. It is worth it for your business to invest in Grafana to bring value to your organization.
