What is a data source?
A data source is just a resource that Grafana uses to obtain the data.
Then, Grafana uses this data to perform visualizations, transformations, and analytics. You can control every aspect of this process from the web interface of Grafana.
So, data sources are data repositories that Grafana can access through its API.
There are different types of data sources, and the list is always growing. To connect to the data sources, Grafana uses plugins (we will see how to connect to data sources in Part 3).
Let’s see some data sources available to use with Grafana:
- MySQL
- MongoDB
- Graphite
- InfluxDB
- OpenTSDB
- PostgreSQL
- Elasticsearch
- Azure Monitor
- Prometheus
- Loki
- Test data
- CSV files and Excel files
This is just a short list of data sources. You can find all the available data sources at https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/?type=datasource.
To navigate and explore the data source plugins installed...
