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.