Grafana is an open-source observability and analytics platform used to visualise metrics, logs, and traces through interactive dashboards. It helps teams monitor system health, performance, and trends across infrastructure, applications, and services. Often described as a metrics visualisation platform, Grafana turns raw telemetry into actionable insights.
Modern systems generate massive volumes of telemetry that are difficult to interpret without proper visualisation. Grafana helps teams quickly understand system behavior, detect anomalies, and track trends over time. This visibility is critical for reducing downtime, improving performance, and making informed operational and business decisions.
Grafana connects to one or more data sources and queries them in real time. Users create dashboards composed of panels that visualise metrics, logs, or traces. Alerting rules can be defined to notify teams when thresholds or patterns indicate potential issues. Grafana also supports correlation across different telemetry types for deeper analysis.
uildPiper integrates with Grafana to combine deployment, environment, and application telemetry with software delivery insights in a unified DORA metrics dashboard platform. By correlating releases with operational dashboards, engineering teams can track key DORA metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery (MTTR) alongside real-time system performance. This integrated view helps teams understand the impact of every deployment, accelerate incident response, and make observability a core part of release management and DevOps workflows.
Grafana is mainly used to visualise and monitor metrics, logs, and traces from various systems. Teams use it to build dashboards, set alerts, and gain insight into infrastructure health, application performance, and operational trends across distributed environments.
Grafana is best described as an observability platform. While it supports traditional monitoring use cases, it also enables deeper analysis by correlating metrics, logs, and traces—helping teams understand not just when something breaks, but why it happens.
BuildPiper works with Grafana by integrating delivery and deployment data into observability workflows. Teams can correlate deployments with performance metrics and alerts in Grafana, enabling faster root cause analysis and more informed release decisions.