Welcome to Learn Grafana 7.0! Together, we will explore Grafana, an exciting, multi-faceted visualization tool for data exploration, analysis, and alerting. We will learn how to install Grafana, become familiar with some of its many features, and even use it to investigate publicly available real-world datasets.

Whether you are an engineer watching terabytes of metrics for a critical system fault, an administrator sifting through a haystack of log output looking for the needle of an application error, or just a curious citizen eager to know how your city works, Grafana can help you monitor, explore, and analyze data. The key to getting a handle on big data is the ability to visualize it.

But before we find out how Grafana gives you that ability, let's briefly review a few basic concepts behind data visualization.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Data and visualization – an overview of the data landscape and how visualization is a useful solution
• Why Grafana? What makes Grafana an attractive solution?
• Installing Grafana – getting the Grafana application installed and running
• Connecting to the Grafana server – launching the application from a web browser