What is a data source in Grafana?

The data source in Grafana is a backend service from which Grafana receives metrics, logs, and traces for visualization.

Examples of data sources:

• Monitoring systems: Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite.
• Logs: Loki, Elasticsearch.
• Tracing: Tempo, Jaeger.
• Cloud services: Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Google Cloud Monitoring.
• Relational databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server (via plugins).

Each data source has a specific type and configuration, which includes connection parameters (address, port, credentials) and specific settings such as data format or authentication mode.

Grafana interacts with the data source via API or special plugins that adapt requests and responses to Grafana's internal formats. This allows creating dashboards that aggregate and visualize data from different sources on a single panel.

Example of Data Source configuration in YAML:

# Example configuration of Prometheus as a data source in Grafana
apiVersion: 1
datasources:
  - name: Prometheus
    type: prometheus
    url: http://prometheus:9090
    access: proxy
    isDefault: true
    version: 1
    editable: false
    jsonData:
      httpMethod: POST
      timeInterval: 15s