Both Kibana and Grafana are data visualization tools providing users capabilities to explore, analyze and visualize data with dashboards. The difference between Kibana and Grafana lies in their genesis. Kibana was built on top of the Elasticsearch stack, famous for log analysis and management. In comparison, Grafana was created mainly for metrics monitoring supporting visualization for time-series databases.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is famous for operating the world’s largest particle accelerator, but did you know that CERN is also at the heart of the world’s largest computing grid? And with such unprecedented computing demands comes some serious observability needs.

Like the fit your friend got on ASOS? There’s a good chance Grafana Cloud had something to do with that. Each year, more than 20 million customers come to the UK-based online retailer to fill their digital carts, and they expect a seamless online experience as they shop and check out. ASOS can consistently provide that with the help of Grafana Cloud. “There are alerts set up for many of our customer-facing journeys,” said Dylan Morley, Lead Principal Engineer at ASOS.

This article is part of a series on setting up an end-to-end monitoring and alerting stack using Prometheus. Continuing our series on setting Prometheus in a Docker container, we will add a Grafana instance to our Prometheus setup. Please refer to the previous article where we use docker compose to run Prometheus and Alertmanager together as that forms the basis to run multiple related containers. We will add a container to run Grafana to the same compose file in this article.

Visuals often communicate better than words, and this is also true for monitoring systems. Dashboards are an essential feature in log monitoring systems, providing great value to those who need to analyze and monitor logs. They help centralize log data in a simple, easy-to-read format, avoid clutter, and allow the team to focus on critical metrics.

FinOps dashboards help manage cloud financial operations by providing real-time visibility into cloud spending, resource utilization, and cost optimization. They are part of the broader FinOps framework, which combines finance and DevOps practices to improve collaboration between technology, finance, and business teams. This collaboration supports financial accountability and optimizes cloud costs.

At Grafana Labs, our mission has always been to empower users with the tools they need to build their own observability solutions. Our big tent philosophy embodies this mission by allowing you to choose the tools and technologies that best suit your needs. In this post, we want to share an update to our LLM plugin that reflects this philosophy in action.