Extending Prometheus with Grafana
The Prometheus web interface provides a functional expression browser that allows us to search and view the data in our time-series database with limited installation. It provides a graphical interface but doesn't allow us to save any of our searches or visualizations. The Prometheus web interface is also limited as it cannot group queries in dashboards. Also, there are not many visualizations that are provided by the interface. This is where we can expand our collected data further with the use of an application such as Grafana.
Grafana allows us to connect directly with the Prometheus time-series database and perform queries and create visually appealing dashboards. Grafana can run as a standalone application on a server. We can preconfigure the Grafana Docker image to deploy onto our system, configured with a connection to our Prometheus database, and with a basic dashboard already set up to monitor our running containers.
The following...