TL;DR: Grafana is the visualization and analytics layer of the cloud-native stack. It connects to telemetry backends such as Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo to query metrics, logs, and traces, turning raw telemetry into interactive dashboards and unified alerts.

We previously covered Backstage, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry:

  • Backstage: Serves as the developer portal and catalog for platform management.
  • Prometheus: Collects, stores, and queries time-series metrics using PromQL.
  • OpenTelemetry (OTel): Provides a standardized framework to generate, collect, transform, and export the three core telemetry signals—Metrics, Traces, and Logs (MELT).

What is Grafana?

Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics platform. It does not normally store telemetry data itself; instead, it queries external data sources and storage backends to present operational insights through interactive dashboards.

It bridges the collection and storage components of the observability ecosystem:

┌─────────────────┐       ┌─────────────────┐       ┌────────────────┐
│   Prometheus    │       │  OpenTelemetry  │       │  Loki / Tempo  │
│    (Metrics)    │       │   (Telemetry)   │       │ (Logs / Traces)│
└────────┬────────┘       └────────┬────────┘       └───────┬────────┘
         │                         │                        │
         │                         ▼                        │
         │                 ┌───────────────┐                │
         └────────────────►│    Backend    │◄───────────────┘
                           │  / Data Store │
                           └───────┬───────┘
                                   │
                                   ▼
                       ┌──────────────────────┐
                       │       Grafana        │
                       │   Visualization &    │
                       │      Analytics       │
                       └──────────────────────┘

Key Capabilities

Grafana can query Prometheus metrics via PromQL, logs from Loki, traces from Tempo, traditional SQL databases, and cloud-provider APIs side by side in unified dashboards.

While supports a wide selection of panel types, including time-series graphs, bar charts, heatmaps, state timelines, node graphs, pie charts, and gauges.

With Unified Alerting, this evaluates query conditions across attached data sources to generate alerts. Notifications can be routed to destinations like Slack, PagerDuty, or custom webhooks.

Configured datasources allow seamless context jumping—such as moving directly from a slow trace span in Tempo to the corresponding application logs in Loki using shared identifiers like trace_id.

Microsoft Power Plaform Analogy

Comparing this setup with the Microsoft Power Platform / Business Applications ecosystem helps clarify the functional boundary of each tool:

  • Backstage = Power Apps / SharePoint Hub: The unified portal where developers discover resources, inspect software catalogs, access documentation, and scaffold new services.

  • OpenTelemetry = Power Automate: The standardized integration and pipeline layer that extracts, transforms, and moves telemetry data across systems.

  • Prometheus = Specialized Database Engine: The purpose-built backend optimized for storing and evaluating time-series metrics.

  • Grafana = Power BI: The reporting and dashboard layer that queries underlying data stores to turn raw operational data into actionable visualizations.

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