While working with a growing amount of diverse data, we quickly realized that we needed a powerful visualization tool, both for ourselves and our customers. Enter Grafana, a Swiss army-knife of data-querying dashboard-creating capabilities. Here are a few reasons why we think it's very cool.

Firstly, Grafana is opensource so you aren't limited in terms of licenses per user or data source. Secondly, it supports a variety of data-sources: from Influxdb, to SQL, to static CSV or text files. Thirdly, it's quite user friendly in helping you to create the right query and select the right graph.



Fourthly, there are a lot visualization options, ranging from standard time-value graphs to more complex geomaps or heatmaps.



Finally, it plays nice with user authentication and access management solutions, meaning that you can keep your user management separate and Grafana will provide admin / edit / readonly rights depending on your configuration.

We've already witnessed a couple of instances where a solution became clear (or a problem apparent) without the need for a complex analyses, having the right metrics displayed in Grafana was enough. We'll continue to expand it's use for our customers as well as our internal needs (test coverage, prediction model accuracy etc.) A great tool we recommend.