Grafana

1. What is Grafana?
Grafana is an open-source data analytics tool for gathering metrics that make sense of enormous volumes
of data and monitoring our applications via cool configurable dashboards. Grafana connects to Graphite,
Prometheus, Influx DB, ElasticSearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other databases.
Grafana's open-source nature allows us to create custom plugins for a range of data sources.
Time-series analytics is a technique for analyzing, tracking, and reviewing data over a long period of time.
2. What is a Grafana Dashboard?
Grafana dashboards are made to bring data together in an organized and effective way. It employs
queries, smart visualizations, and alerts to assist users in better comprehending their data's metrics.
Grafana dashboards not only give meaning to data obtained from a variety of sources but can also be
shared with other team members, allowing you to collaborate on data analysis.
Here's an example of a Grafana dashboard that's being used to keep track of things:
Graphite, Prometheus, Influx DB, ElasticSearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other plugged-in data sources are
used to populate the dashboards. These are just a few of the many data sources Grafana comes pre-loaded
with.
3. What are the features of Grafana?
Key features of Grafana:
i) Panels: From heatmaps to histograms. Geo maps to graphs. Grafana's visualisations are fast and flexible, allowing
you to visualise your data however you want.
ii) Plugins: Plugins for Grafana enable you to connect your tools and teams. Data source plugins link to existing data
sources via APIs and render data in real-time, removing the need for data migration or ingestion.
iii) Alerts: Grafana alerting allows you to centralise and unify all of your alerts by allowing you to create, manage,
and silence them all from a single interface.
iv) Transformations: You may rename, summarise, aggregate, and calculate data across several searches and data
sources using transformations.
v) Annotations: Rich events from many data sources can be annotated into graphs. You may see all of an event's
metadata and tags by hovering your mouse over it.
vi) Panel Editor: With a consistent UI for configuring data settings across all of your visualizations, the panel editor
makes it simple to build, alter, and explore all of your panels.
4. Why Grafana?
Your data should be brought together, not your database.
Grafana eliminates the need to ingest data into a backend store or vendor database. Grafana, on the
other hand, takes a unique approach to provide a "single pane of glass" by bringing together all of your
existing data, regardless of where it is kept.
Grafana allows you to visualize any existing data from a single dashboard, including data from your
Kubernetes cluster, Raspberry Pi, multiple cloud services, and even Google Sheets.
Flexibility and versatility
Any of your data may be made into a dashboard that is versatile and customizable. Unlike other systems,
Grafana allows you to develop bespoke dashboards for you and your team.
Using advanced querying and modification features, you may personalize your panels to create
visualizations that are truly valuable to you.
The data is visible to all.
Grafana was founded on the idea that data should be accessible to everyone in your organization, not just
the Ops team.
Grafana democratizes data, which helps to break down data silos and empower teams, and so promotes a
culture where data can be easily used and accessed by those who need it.
Anyone can utilize the dashboards
Grafana dashboards not only provide meaningful meaning to data gathered from a variety of sources but
they can also be shared with other team members, allowing you to study the data together.
Anyone can use Grafana to create and share dynamic dashboards that promote collaboration and
transparency.
5. Is it possible to use Grafana without Prometheus?
Grafana can only access data from third-party systems like Prometheus, MySQL, Azure Monitor, and Amazon
CloudWatch, among others. Grafana is so dependent on other systems for data because it lacks the ability to
collect data on its own, whether via agents or other data pipelines.
6. Is Grafana a reporting tool?
Grafana isn't a reporting tool; it's a dashboard tool. Grafana is open-source and free, however, it lacks reporting
capabilities. Grafana Enterprise Stack edition, which costs at least $3,500 per month, is the only way to get basic
reporting functionality.
7. What type of monitoring can be done via Grafana?
Grafana is the most widely used open-source tool for querying, visualising and alerting metrics and logs
from everywhere. Time-series databases like Graphite, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, OpenTSDB, and
InfluxDB are used to query.
8. What databases work with Grafana?
Grafana was first launched in 2014 and can now connect to a variety of data sources such as MySQL, SQL Server,
Graphite, Prometheus, and others. This tool is most commonly used to build a time-series data visualization, which
illustrates the health or utilization of a resource over time.
9. What is Grafana Cloud?
Grafana Cloud is a scalable, highly available, and performant observability platform for your applications and
infrastructure. It allows you to see all of your observability data in one place, whether it's stored in Grafana Cloud
Metrics or on your own bare-metal and cloud systems. With built-in support for Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and
Amazon CloudWatch, all you have to do is configure data sources in Grafana Cloud to start developing dashboards
and querying metrics data.
10. What is Grafana Enterprise?
Grafana Enterprise is a paid version of Grafana that offers capabilities not available in the free source
version. Grafana Enterprise gives you access to enterprise plugins, which allow you to use your existing
data sources in Grafana. This means you can get the most out of your complicated, costly monitoring
solutions and databases by viewing all of the data in a more efficient and effective manner.
Top Grafana Interview Questions For Experienced
11. What Is Prometheus Grafana?
Prometheus is an open-source data monitoring tool. Prometheus and Grafana are the industry standard
tool combination for deploying a data visualization solution. Grafana is used to visualize the data, and
Prometheus is used to fuel the backend.
Prometheus, on the other hand, has data visualization options. Grafana, on the other hand, continues to
be the most often used data visualization tool. Prometheus data is retrieved using queries that are
initiated from the dashboard. It is the most suitable open-source data model for storing time-series data.
12. Grafana vs Prometheus
Parameters Grafana Prometheus

The data is grouped and loaded WAL replay is improved, and

Metrics of performance.
in steps. memory utilization is optimized.
 Grafana includes a multitude of
Prometheus, on the other hand,
choices for showing time-series
must rely on console templates
data as an open-source data
for visualization. It can graph
Editing and Visualization of Data visualization tool. It also provides
data, but it has to rely on
users with other tools, such as
Grafana for full frameworks like
plugins, to help them visualize
queries and dashboards.
their data.

Grafana is nothing more than a Here, Prometheus has the upper

data visualization tool. When it hand. It excels in storing and
Memory
comes to data storage, it is organizing time-series data via
hopeless. important value labeling.

Prometheus' alarm system is

Grafana allows the user to set split into two pieces. The alerting
the time for alert rule evaluation. rules send messages to alert
Alarms and Tracking Users are told here if the managers. The alerts are then
triggered alert needs to be controlled by alert managers,
adjusted. who may deliver notifications by
email or through other channels.

Provides data in a time-series

format.
System of alerts
PromQL is a flexible query
Key Highlights Your data will be unified.
language that enables users to
Sharing a dashboard.
pick data in real time.
A multi-dimensional data model

Prometheus collects data metrics

AWS CloudWatch, Graphite,
Supported Data Sources from monitored targets by
Azure Monitor, ElasticSearch
scraping HTTP endpoints.

13. Describe Graphite Grafana.

The Graphite ecosystem offers a scalable platform for collecting and storing time-series data, as well as a
robust collection of functions for querying and analyzing the data over time. Grafana can effortlessly
collect Graphite metrics, giving you a powerful tool for collecting, visualizing, and increasing the value of
your Graphite data.
A few benefits of integrating Grafana with Graphite have listed below:
Because of the centralized, horizontally scalable, replicated design, you can easily manage and maintain
your Graphite installation according to your unique architecture.
When a monitoring stack comes fully formed and configured, there's no need to build systems from open-
source components.
Thanks to best-in-class query performance, you can easily create real-time dashboards that can be shared
across your organization.
With strong data-access controls, administrators can secure and regulate your metrics data.
14. Grafana Vs Kibana
 Parameters Grafana Kibana

Grafana's design is optimized for

analyzing and visualizing system
On the other side, Kibana is an
Logs vs. Metrics (Logging vs. metrics including CPU, memory,
Elasticsearch-based log message
Monitoring). disc, and I/O utilization. The
analysis tool.
platform does not allow for full-
text data querying.

Grafana is a graphical user

interface for analyzing metrics.
As a result, it has built-in Kibana, on the other hand, was
connections to Graphite, designed just for Elasticsearch
Data sources and integrations
Prometheus, InfluxDB, MySQL, and does not support any other
PostgreSQL, and Elasticsearch, as data sources.
well as plugins for additional
data sources.

Grafana has built-in user

management and authentication Your Kibana dashboards are
options for restricting and open and accessible to the public
Authentication and access
controlling access to your by default unless you use the X-
control
dashboards, as well as the ability Pack or open-source alternatives
to leverage an external SQL or like SearchGuard.
LDAP server.

Since version 4. x, Grafana has Kibana doesn't come with an

had a built-in alerting engine that alerting feature by default. To
allows users to attach conditional give alerting to Kibana, users can
Alerts
rules to dashboard panels and either use a hosted ELK Stack like
receive triggered alerts to their Logz.io, implement ElastAlert, or
preferred notification endpoint. use X-Pack.

15. Explain about AWS Grafana.

With Amazon Managed Grafana, you can view your metrics, logs, and traces without having to provision servers,
configure and update software, or deal with the time-consuming task of protecting and scaling Grafana in
production.
You can create, explore, and share observability dashboards with your team to spend less time managing your
Grafana infrastructure and more time improving the health, performance, and availability of your apps.
You can connect Amazon Managed Grafana to a variety of observability data sources, including AWS data sources
like Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service, third-party
ISVs like Datadog, and Splunk, and self-managed data sources like InfluxDB. Amazon Managed Grafana integrates
seamlessly with AWS services, allowing you to securely add, query, visualize, and analyze your AWS data.
16. How does AWS Grafana Works?
The process how AWS Grafana how is demonstrated in the below image:
Create Grafana workspaces: Create a workspace that is built, deployed, and managed automatically.
Manage user access: Using AWS single sign-on integration, provide users access to the workspace.
Connect to multiple data sources: Add multiple data sources
Set up dashboards: Visualize and analyze logs, metrics, and track data across data sources all in one console.
Centralize third-party ISV data: To add more data sources, upgrade to Grafana Enterprise (optional).
17. What is Grafana Loki and How does it work?
Grafana Loki is a log aggregation tool that collects and organizes logs from all of your apps and infrastructure. It
offers a unique approach by indexing only the metadata of the log lines rather than the complete text.
The procedure of how Grafana Loki works is explained below:
18. Why use Grafana Loki?
Because you may distribute logs in any format, from any source, and through a number of clients, getting started is
simple.
With 100 per cent persistence to object storage, you get petabyte-scale, fast throughput, cost-effective & durable
storage, and cost-effective & durable storage.
Your log lines can be used to create metrics and alarms.
Ingestion logs have no formatting requirements, providing you more flexibility and the ability to format at query
time.
Follow your logs in real-time to see them as they arrive in the system, to have them updated after a set length of
time, to see logs for a given day, and so on.
Prometheus, Grafana, and K8s all have native integrations, allowing you to seamlessly move between metrics, logs,
and traces.
19. What are exemplars in Grafana?
In Grafana, an exemplar is a specific trace that represents a recurrent pattern of data in a given time interval. It aids in the
discovery of higher cardinality metadata inside time series data.
Consider the case when your company's website is seeing an increase in visitors. While more than 80% of
users can access the website in less than two seconds, some users are experiencing a longer than typical
response time, resulting in a negative user experience.
You must compare a trace for a rapid response to a trace for a slow response in order to determine the
elements that are contributing to the latency. Given the enormous volume of data in a typical production
setting, this will be a very time-consuming and arduous task.
You can use exemplars to assist isolate faults in your data distribution by isolating query traces with excessive latency within a
time interval.
20. What is the Grafana time series?
The default and most popular approach to visualizing time series data is time series visualization. A line, a
dot path, or a group of bars can all be used to represent it. Because of its flexibility, it can display virtually
any time-series data.
Common time series options available in Grafana are
• Tooltip mode
• Legend mode
• Legend placement
21. What is a label in Grafana?
Labels are a type of key-value pair. To describe a log stream, we call them metadata. Labels are
particularly crucial in Loki since they define a stream. More precisely, the stream is defined by the
combination of each label key and value.
22. What are metrics and visualizations?
Metrics are units of measurement that describe the size of something, such as the amount of memory in a
computer system or the length of a desktop in centimetres. In Grafana, metrics are most useful when they
are gathered often over time. This allows us to compare things like how system resource availability is
altered when a programme is run.
In a time-series database (TSDB) like Prometheus, these types of metrics are recorded and associated with
a time stamp. Although each TSDB has its unique data schema, they all share these two characteristics,
and Grafana Cloud can visualize their varied metrics formats.
Visualization is a graph that shows how resource utilization has changed over time. Using visualizations to
compare these time-stamped measurements over time makes it quick and straightforward to spot
changes in a computer system, particularly as events occur.
23. What is Grafana Tempo?
Grafana Tempo is an open-source and user-friendly high-volume distributed tracing backend. Tempo is a
low-cost operating system that only requires object storage and is strongly integrated with Grafana,
Prometheus, and Loki. Tempo supports open-source tracing protocols such as Jaeger, Zipkin, and
OpenTelemetry.
24. How can I configure Grafana so that viewing dashboards does not require a password?
[auth.anonymous]
# enable anonymous access
enabled = true
[auth.basic]
enabled = false
25. What are Grafana plugins?
Plugins make Grafana better by adding features that aren't currently present. You can use plugins to
import data from a number of sources, bundle data sources and panels, and add new visualization types
to dashboards.
Panels, data sources, and apps are the three types of plugins supported by Grafana.
Panel plugins: To add new visuals to your dashboard, use panel plugins like the Worldmap Panel, Clock, and Pie Chart.
Panel plugins accomplish the following:
It is possible to see the results of data source searches.
Switch between dashboards as needed.
It is possible to operate external systems, such as smart home devices.
Data source plugins: Data source plugins now handle new databases, such as Google BigQuery. Data
source plugins allow you to connect to external data sources and get data in a Grafana-friendly format.
Using a data source plugin, you can use the data in any of your existing dashboards.
App plugins: App plugins can be used to offer a tailored out-of-the-box monitoring experience.
26. What exactly is k6?
Grafana k6 is an open-source load testing tool for engineering teams that makes performance testing
simple and efficient. k6 is free, open-source, and extensible.
k6 can be used to assess the reliability and performance of your systems, allowing you to detect
performance regressions and problems sooner. k6 will help you create applications that are scalable,
robust, and fast.
Some of the most common k6 use-cases are as follows:
Load testing: k6 is designed to run high-load tests (spike, stress, and soak tests) while using minimal
resources.
Synthetic monitoring and performance: By running tests with a small amount of load, you may utilise
k6 to frequently assess the performance and availability of your production system.
Consistency and chaos testing: The architecture of k6 is extendable. You can use k6 to generate traffic
as part of your chaotic experiments, or you can use it to trigger traffic from your k6 tests.
27. What is the Grafana panel?
Grafana panels are the user interface for creating a data source query as well as processing and structuring data for
visualisations. A panel editor includes a query builder as well as a variety of options for data transformation and data addition
to your panels.
28. Explain Grafana Alerts
Alerts allow you to be notified as soon as a system problem arises. Robust and responsive notifications let
you discover and resolve problems quickly, reducing service disruption.
Grafana 8.0 included new and improved alerting, which combines alerting data into a single, searchable
dashboard. You'll be able to do things like:
Set up and manage Grafana alerts.
Create and manage Loki and Cortex-managed alerts.
View alerting data from Prometheus and Alertmanager compatible data sources.
Grafana alerts are enabled by default for new OSS installations. For older movies, it's still an opt-in option.
Grafana alerting is made up of four main elements:
Alerting rule -An alerting rule is a set of evaluation criteria that determines whether or not an alert will be
triggered. It contains one or more queries and expressions, a condition, the frequency with which the
condition is evaluated, and, optionally, the time over which the condition is met.
Contact point - When the conditions of an alerting rule are met, the contact point is used to deliver
notifications.
Notification policy - A set of matching and grouping criteria used to define where and how often
notifications should be sent.
Silences - When a notice is silenced, it is based on the date and matching criteria.
29) What's the best way to check if the Grafana service is running or not?
You may verify that Grafana is up and running by using the status command, as shown below:
$ sudo systemctl status grafana-server
30) How do I configure Grafana so that I can view dashboards without logging in?
Make the following changes to default.ini/grafana.ini to enable anonymous login (Grafana\conf).
If you wish to make the login page disappear, do the following changes:
[auth]
# Set to true to disable (hide) the login form, useful if you use OAuth
#disable_login_form = false
disable_login_form = true
Update disable_login_form to true.
[auth.anonymous]
# enable anonymous access
enabled = true
Specify the organization:
# specify organization name that should be used for unauthenticated users
org_name = YOUR_ORG_NAME_HERE
You should be able to see your dashboard after restarting Grafana. If this isn't the case, please switch your organization's role
from Viewer to Editor.
# specify role for unauthenticated users
org_role = Editor