📊Grafana Dashboards & Observability

Build beautiful, actionable visualizations. Master variables, transformations, provisioning, Loki for logs, and Tempo for distributed tracing correlation.

Single Server RED Metrics Multi-tenant + GitOps

Architecture & How It Works 09.1

Grafana is a visualization layer. It queries many backends (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, CloudWatch). Dashboards can be fully provisioned from YAML/JSON for GitOps.

graph TD G[Grafana] --> P[Prometheus] G --> L[Loki] G --> T[Tempo] subgraph Provisioning D[dashboards.yaml] DS[datasources.yaml] end

Core Components 09.2

Feature	Purpose	Example
Panels	Visualizations	Time series, Stat, Gauge, Table
Variables	Dynamic queries	$__interval, $datasource
Transformations	Post-processing	Reduce, Join, Organize fields
Provisioning	GitOps dashboards	dashboards.yaml + git
Loki + Tempo	Logs + Traces	LogQL, TraceQL correlation

WSL Hands-On Lab 09.3

Deploy Grafana + Loki + Promtail + Import Famous Dashboards

full stack

$ docker compose up -d
$ # Import dashboard ID 1860 (Node Exporter Full)
$ # Add Loki datasource and configure Promtail

Deploy Grafana + Loki + Prometheus stack with Docker Compose
Import Node Exporter dashboard 1860
Build a custom dashboard using variables and transformations
Configure Promtail to ship logs from containers to Loki
Explore Grafana Play environment and complete official tutorials

Real-World Project 09.4

Single server infrastructure dashboard

Application RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration) dashboard

Multi-tenant orgs + GitOps dashboard provisioning + trace to logs correlation

Troubleshooting 09.5

Verify datasource config, query inspector, time range, and browser console for WebSocket errors.

Add recording rules in Prometheus. Increase $__interval. Use transformations to reduce data client-side.

30-Day Roadmap 09.6

WEEK 1

Dashboard Fundamentals

Panel types
Query editor
JSON model basics

WEEK 2

Variables & Templating

Query variables
Chained variables
Repeat panels

WEEK 3

Loki Logging

LogQL queries
Promtail pipelines
Log panels + derived fields

WEEK 4

Tempo + Enterprise

Trace correlation
Provisioning as code
Multi-org / RBAC

Deep Dive: Provisioning & Advanced Observability 09.7

GitOps Dashboards

Store dashboard JSON in Git. Use dashboards.yaml to load them at startup. Never edit dashboards through the UI in production — treat them as code.

Trace + Log Correlation

Add trace IDs to logs. Use derived fields in Loki to jump from logs into Tempo traces. This dramatically speeds up debugging distributed systems.

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