Surveying Key Grafana Visualizations

In the previous chapter, we looked at transformation, the second stage of what I like to call the visualization pipeline. Before this, we looked at the initial stage of this pipeline, the data source query, and the final stage of the pipeline, visualization, specifically the time series panel visualization. In this and the following chapter, we’ll concentrate almost exclusively on the visualization stage of the pipeline.

By now, Grafana has built an impressive number of panel visualizations, encompassing all manner of data and information presentation. Indeed, at the time of writing, there are nearly 25 visualizations in various stages of release, not including third-party add-on visualizations, which bring the total to over 100.

Up until now, we’ve been using the time series visualization in our panels, and not without reason; it’s a powerful tool and has existed in some form since Grafana was initially released. While...