Introducing Data Visualization with Grafana

Welcome to Learn Grafana 10.x! Together, we will explore Grafana, an exciting, multi-faceted visualization tool for data exploration, analysis, and alerting. We will learn how to install Grafana, become familiar with some of its many features, and even use it to investigate publicly available real-world datasets.

Whether you are an engineer watching terabytes of metrics for a critical system fault, an administrator sifting through a haystack of log output looking for the needle of an application error, or just a curious citizen eager to know how your city works, Grafana can help you monitor, explore, and analyze data. The key to getting a handle on big data is the ability to visualize it.

But before we find out how Grafana gives you that ability, we’ll need to cover a few basic concepts behind data visualization. Following that, we’ll set up our own instance of Grafana, which will form the fundamental building block for the exercises that follow in later chapters.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Appreciating data and visualization – we’ll take a brief overview of the data landscape and how visualization is useful
• Why Grafana? We’ll look at what makes Grafana an attractive solution
• Installing Grafana – we’ll install the Grafana application server and get it running
• Connecting to the Grafana server – we’ll launch the Grafana application by connecting to the installed server from a web browser

Tutorial code, dashboards, and other helpful files for this chapter can be found in the book’s GitHub repository at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Grafana-10/tree/main/Chapter01.