From the course: Prometheus and Grafana: Visualizing Application Performance

Grafana overview and features

From the course: Prometheus and Grafana: Visualizing Application Performance

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Grafana overview and features

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- [Instructor] It's time to talk about Grafana, the reason you chose to take this course. Grafana has become synonymous with Prometheus for visualizing metrics. It is developed by the good people at Grafana Labs and primarily provides visualizations using charts and graphs within dashboards. Organizations use Grafana to build dashboards and provide insights from a wide variety of data. The Grafana team mostly takes an open source development approach, which has lowered the cost of adoption as well. One key advantage Grafana has is the ability to connect more than 150 different types of data sources. This is very powerful as it allows teams to pull in data from most of the tools they use, providing a one-stop shop for visualization across the entire organization. In this course, we will primarily be focusing on the Prometheus data source, but I'll show you how to connect to several other data sources in chapter three and beyond. Another underrated feature of Grafana is the alerting functionality. Most people do not know this, but you can configure Grafana to send alerts based on well-defined thresholds, the same way you can using Prometheus. You can define custom alerting rules, and Grafana will automatically trigger notifications when those conditions are met. There is support for various well-known channels like email, Slack, or other platforms. We will discuss Grafana alerting in good detail in chapter six. Since we are in the era of artificial intelligence no great course will skip over the AI features present in any tool and how they can help you achieve your goals like other platforms, the Grafana team has been hard at work to bring AI and LLM features to your doorstep. This is why in chapter seven we will go on a deep dive on how you can use the current groundbreaking AI technology to build better, faster, and more intuitive dashboards. We'll even look at how to make a simple plugin that can use an AI agent to assist you to create complex Grafana panels. If you're not familiar with LLMs and AI in general, don't worry. We'll also go through a brief introduction of those concepts to get you started.

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