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Tools / Monitoring and Observability Interview Questions

What is Grafana and how does it integrate with Prometheus?

Grafana is an open-source analytics and visualization platform that lets you query, visualize, and alert on metrics from a wide variety of data sources — Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch, and many more — all from a single UI.

The integration with Prometheus works through a data source plugin. You configure Prometheus as a data source in Grafana by providing its HTTP endpoint. From that point, Grafana panels can issue PromQL queries against Prometheus's API and render the results as time-series graphs, heatmaps, stat panels, or tables.

Grafana does not store your metrics — it is a read-only query and visualization layer on top of Prometheus (or any other backend). This separation of concerns means you can switch visualization tools without touching the data store, and you can query the same Prometheus instance from multiple Grafana instances.

Grafana also has its own alerting engine (Grafana Unified Alerting) that can evaluate PromQL expressions and route alerts through contact points — Slack, PagerDuty, email — similar to Prometheus Alertmanager. In many organizations both are used: Alertmanager for rule evaluation close to the data, Grafana alerting for cross-datasource rules.

The Grafana LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) has become a popular open-source alternative to commercial platforms, with Mimir providing horizontally scalable long-term storage for Prometheus metrics.

Does Grafana store metrics data itself?
What does the M in the LGTM stack stand for?

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