Infrastructure monitoring (ITOM)
Visualize the health of servers, network, and databases at a glance.
Observability · Courses
Grafana: From Discovery to Expertise
Discover how to administer Grafana, configure data sources, and build dynamic, interactive dashboards to visualize your data and metrics.
At your pace, through practice.By the end of this course you will be able to
- Connect Grafana to Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch and other sources
- Build dynamic dashboards with variables and transformations
- Provision dashboards and data sources as code
- Set up alerts and get started with Grafana Cloud
LEARNING PATH
Course curriculum
0Course overview1 lesson
1Introduction3 lessons
2Administration2 lessons
Understand the settings needed to secure your Grafana server
3Connections4 lessons
Understand how to configure and retrieve data from various sources.
4Dashboards5 lessons
Group your dashlets into a coherent dashboard
5Variables and constants5 lessons
6Queries1 lesson
Understand how to filter your data
7Transformations4 lessons
For some visualizations it matters that the data has the right type, the right structure... transformations will help you adapt your data.
8Visualizations2 lessons
Create your first visualizations
9Grafana Cloud1 lesson
A few enterprise use cases
10Grafana Cloud: observability solutions6 lessons
Applications, frontend, Kubernetes, synthetic, load testing, Knowledge Graph.
11Grafana Cloud: operations and costs5 lessons
IRM, SLOs, Adaptive Telemetry, Fleet Management, costs, PDC.
12Editions: OSS, Enterprise and Cloud2 lessons
What each edition brings, and Enterprise features.
13Use cases8 lessons
A few enterprise use cases
- Project 1: HTTP status codesHands-on lab · ⏱ 49 min · Level 2/5
- Project 2: Working with the Dynatrace APIHands-on lab · ⏱ 21 min · Level 2/5
- Project 3: Working with dataHands-on lab · ⏱ 1 h 31 · Level 3/5
- Project 4: Working with ElasticsearchHands-on lab · ⏱ 2 h 27 · Level 3/5
- Project 5: Getting hands-onHands-on lab · ⏱ 2 h 41 · Level 3/5
- Grafana Assistant: AI for observabilityArticle · ⏱ 6 min
- Grafana or Kibana?Article · ⏱ 3 min
- The LGTM stackArticle · ⏱ 3 min
14Best practices1 lesson
Recommended practices to run the product in production.
LEARN BY DOING
Use cases & applications
Application performance monitoring (APM)
Monitor response times, error rates and application traffic.
IoT and home automation
Display real-time sensor data (temperature, humidity, consumption).
Business dashboards (BI)
Aggregate sales data, sign-ups, or business KPIs.
Centralized alerting
Trigger notifications via Slack, Email or PagerDuty when thresholds are exceeded.
Unified observability
Correlate Prometheus metrics, Loki logs, and Tempo traces in one place.
Recommended prerequisites
What next?
Frequently asked questions
What is Grafana?
It's an open-source platform for visualizing and analyzing metrics.
Which data sources are supported?
Grafana supports many sources such as Prometheus, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.
What's the difference between Grafana and Kibana?
Kibana is closely tied to Elasticsearch for logs, while Grafana is more agnostic and excels at metrics and multi-source integration.
Can you configure alerts?
Yes, Grafana has a powerful built-in alerting system.
How do you secure Grafana?
Through authentication (LDAP, OAuth), HTTPS, and fine-grained permissions per folder and dashboard.
What is a dashboard variable?
It makes dashboards dynamic (e.g. filtering by server or environment).
Can dashboards be exported?
Yes, in JSON format to back them up or share them.
Grafana Cloud or self-hosted?
Grafana Cloud is a managed SaaS service; self-hosting gives you full control over the infrastructure.
What are annotations?
Visual markers on graphs to indicate events (deployments, outages).
Can Grafana be used for logs?
Yes, notably with Loki, the log solution built into the Grafana ecosystem.
How do I share a variable across several Grafana dashboards?
Enable the grafana.dashboardGlobalVariables feature toggle, create the variable in Dashboards > Variables, global or limited to a folder, then attach it to each dashboard through Edit, + and Variable, choosing Global or folder variable. The feature is in public preview.