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Grafana + Prometheus

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description Grafana + Prometheus Overview

This combination represents the gold standard for highly customizable, self-hosted monitoring. Prometheus scrapes metrics from targets, and Grafana provides the visualization layer. While it requires significant initial setup expertise, the resulting system is infinitely customizable, cost-effective at scale, and provides unparalleled control over data pipelines. It is the choice for mature engineering teams with dedicated MLOps/SRE staff.

help Grafana + Prometheus FAQ

What does Prometheus do in a Grafana + Prometheus setup?

Prometheus scrapes time-series metrics from targets such as servers, Kubernetes pods, or application exporters. Grafana then connects to Prometheus as a data source and turns those metrics into dashboards.

Why do Kubernetes teams often use Grafana with Prometheus?

Prometheus fits Kubernetes well because it can discover scrape targets through service discovery and labels. Grafana is then used for cluster dashboards covering CPU, memory, request rates, and alert context.

How is Grafana + Prometheus different from Datadog or New Relic?

Grafana + Prometheus can be self-hosted and deeply customized, while Datadog and New Relic are managed commercial observability platforms. The tradeoff is that Prometheus usually requires more setup work for retention, scaling, and alert routing.

Does Grafana send alerts, or does Prometheus?

Both can be part of alerting, but Prometheus commonly pairs with Alertmanager for routing alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, or email. Grafana also has its own alerting system, especially useful when teams already manage dashboards there.

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