grafana

**Grafana** is an open-source **visualization and analytics platform** that creates dashboards, graphs, and alerts from time-series data sources. It is the most widely used tool for visualizing infrastructure, application, and ML system metrics. **Core Capabilities** - **Dashboards**: Create interactive, customizable dashboards with panels showing graphs, tables, heatmaps, gauges, and stat displays. - **Data Source Integration**: Connects to **50+ data sources** including Prometheus, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, CloudWatch, Datadog, and more. - **Alerting**: Define alert rules on any metric with notifications via email, Slack, PagerDuty, Teams, webhooks. - **Variables and Templating**: Create dynamic dashboards with dropdowns for filtering by service, model version, environment, region, etc. **Grafana for AI/ML Systems** - **GPU Monitoring Dashboard**: Visualize GPU utilization, memory usage, temperature, and power consumption across a GPU cluster using NVIDIA DCGM metrics. - **Inference Performance**: Track p50/p95/p99 latency, throughput, error rates, and queue depth for model serving endpoints. - **Cost Tracking**: Display token usage, compute costs, and API spending over time. - **Model Comparison**: Side-by-side panels comparing performance metrics across model versions or A/B test variants. - **Drift Detection**: Visualize input data distribution changes and model quality degradation over time. **Key Features** - **Annotations**: Mark events (deployments, incidents, model updates) on graphs to correlate with metric changes. - **Panel Plugins**: Extend with community plugins for specialized visualizations. - **Explore Mode**: Ad-hoc querying and investigation without building a dashboard. - **Dashboard-as-Code**: Define dashboards in JSON and manage them in version control (Grafana Terraform provider, Grafonnet). **Common Stack** - **Prometheus + Grafana**: The standard monitoring stack — Prometheus collects and stores metrics, Grafana visualizes them. - **Loki + Grafana**: Log aggregation and visualization — Loki stores logs, Grafana searches and displays them. - **Tempo + Grafana**: Distributed tracing visualization. Grafana is the **universal visualization layer** for infrastructure monitoring — your GPU cluster, inference servers, and ML pipelines all feed into Grafana dashboards for unified visibility.