Top Grafana Interview Questions (2024)

1. What is Grafana?

2. What is Grafana Dashboard?

3. How do you check if the Grafana service is running or not?

4. What is Grafana Cloud?

5. How to configure Grafana, so that dashboards can be viewed without requiring a password?

6. What is Grafana Enterprise?

7. How to install Grafana using docker?

8. What is Prometheus Grafana and how to integrate together?

9. What Is Graphite Grafana?

10. What is Grafana alerting?

11. How do I add alerts to Grafana?

12. What is Loki Grafana?

13. What Alert Notification Channels does Grafana Support?

14. How to setup Email Alerts Notification Channel in Grafana?

15. What is difference between Grafana and Kibana?

16. How do I create a drop down menu in Grafana dashboard based on a Sysdig metrics label?

Q: What is Grafana?
Ans:

Grafana is an open source tool for performing data analytics, retrieving metrics that make sense of large amounts of data, and monitoring our apps using nice configurable dashboards.

Grafana integrates with a wide range of data sources, including Graphite, Prometheus, Influx DB, ElasticSearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and others. When connected to supported data sources, it provides web-based charts, graphs, and alerts.

Q: What is a Grafana Dashboard?
Ans:

Here's an example of a Grafana dashboard that's being used to keep track and monitor the data.

The dashboards use data from Graphite, Prometheus, Influx DB, ElasticSearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other data sources. Grafana supports a wide range of data sources by default.

The dashboards have a wide range of visualization options, including geo maps, heat maps, histograms, and all of the charts and graphs that a business could need to analyse data.

Q: How do you check if the Grafana service is running or not?
Ans:

You can validate that Grafana is running by checking the service's status command as given below:

$ sudo systemctl status grafana-server

Q: What is Grafana Cloud?
Ans:

Grafana Cloud is an open SaaS Software as a Service metrics platform that is cloud-native, highly accessible, and fast. Especially useful for those who don't want to deal with managing the full deployment infrastructure and don't want to take on the burden of hosting the solution on-premise.

It runs on Kubernetes clusters. The backend is compatible with Prometheus and Graphite. As a result, we have the option of using Grafana cloud instances or both. For further information, go to this Grafana Cloud Official Page.

Q: How to configure Grafana, so that dashboards can be viewed without requiring a password?
Ans:

Make the following small configuration modifications to the default.ini/grafana.ini file to enable anonymous login (Grafana\conf).

• If you wish to hide the login page, make the following changes:

  [auth]
  # Set to true to disable (hide) the login form, useful if you use OAuth
  #disable_login_form = false
  disable_login_form = true

  Update disable_login_form to true.
• Update disable_login_form to true.

  [auth.anonymous]
  # enable anonymous access
  enabled = true

• Specify the organization:

  # specify organization name that should be used for unauthenticated users
  org_name = YOUR_ORG_NAME_HERE
  

• You should be able to see the Grafana dashboard after restarting Grafana. If this isn't the case, simply change your org role from Viewer to Editor:

  # specify role for unauthenticated users
  org_role = Editor
  

Q: What is Grafana Enterprise?
Ans:

The Enterprise service includes all of the Grafana Cloud capabilities, as well as premium plugins, data sources, and core team support. Response SLAs, trainings, and other services are provided. For more info, refer official site.

Q: How to install Grafana using docker?
Ans:

Docker is a set of platform as a service tools that deliver software in containers using OS-level virtualization. Containers are self-contained, containing their own software, libraries, and configuration files, and communicating with one another via well-defined channels. Docker makes it simple for developers to package, ship, and execute any application as a lightweight, portable, self-contained container that can operate almost anywhere.
Follow the steps to Install Grafana using Docker .

Q: What is Prometheus Grafana and how to integrate together?
Ans:

Prometheus is a data monitoring tool that is free and open source. In the industry, the combination of Prometheus and Grafana is the de-facto tool for deploying a data visualization infrastructure. The data is visualized using the Grafana dashboard, while the backend is powered by Prometheus.

Prometheus, on the other hand, includes data visualisation tools and functionalities. However, Grafana is preferred for data visualisation. The data is retrieved from Prometheus and queries are fired from the dashboard. It serves as an ideal open source data model for storing time series information.
Refer Spring Boot + Prometheus + Grafana Integration Example.

Q: What Is Graphite Grafana?
Ans:

Graphite is a monitoring tool yet again. It makes time series data storage and viewing easier. In a data monitoring setup, Graphite is best used as a data source for Grafana dashboard.
Grafana provides an advanced Graphite query editor that allows us to interact with data using expressions and functions.

Q: What is Grafana alerting?
Ans:

Grafana alerts work the same way they do in an on-premises Grafana implementation. A graph panel within a Grafana dashboard is used to create these alerts. Whenever you want to make a simple alert based on one metric from within a panel, this is beneficial.

Q: How do I add alerts to Grafana?
Ans:

Create an alert rule by following below steps.

• Hold your mouse over the Grafana Cloud Alerting icon in Grafana and then click Alerts and rules.
• If you have more than one Prometheus or Loki data source, you can select one from a choice at the top when creating or editing rules.
• Select Edit rules from the drop-down menu.
• Select Add rule from the drop-down menu.

Q: What is Loki Grafana?
Ans:

Loki is a Prometheus-inspired horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system. It is intended to be both cost-effective and simple to use. It uses a set of labels for each log stream rather than indexing the contents of the logs.

Q: What Alert Notification Channels does Grafana Support?
Ans:

Majorly it supports below Alert Notification Channels

• Email
• Slack
• Kafka
• Google Hangouts Chat
• Microsoft Teams

Q: How to setup Email Alerts Notification Channel in Grafana?
Ans:

We need to modify the SMTP settings in the grafana.ini file, which is located in /etc/grafana/grafana.ini, to set up email alerts in Grafana.

• ssh to the grafana node

  ssh hostname@ip
  

• Update the grafana configuration

  sudo vim /etc/grafana/grafana.ini
  

• Update the SMTP configuration and save it.

  ######### SMTP / Emailing #######
  [smtp]
  ;enabled = true
  ;host = smtp-mail.outlook.com:587 #Port 25(Without TLS/SSL)
  ;user = Your_Email_Address@gmail.com
  # If the password contains # or ; you have to wrap it with triple quotes. Ex """#password;"""
  ;password = """Your_Password"""
  ;cert_file =
  ;key_file =
  ;skip_verify = true
  ;from_address = Your_Email_Address@gmail.com
  ;from_name = Your_Name
  # EHLO identity in SMTP dialog (defaults to instance_name)
  ;ehlo_identity =
  
  [emails]
  ;welcome_email_on_sign_up = false
  ;templates_pattern = emails/*.html
  

• Restart the grafana server

  sudo service grafana-server restart
  

• Open the grafana app and go to the alert icon and click notification channels -> New Channel.
• Select email type and Add the email notification configuration details.
• Click on Save.
Now we have successfully set up the email notification channel.

Q: What is difference between Grafana and Kibana?
Ans:

Kibana's main purpose was to analyze and monitor logs. In the ELK stack, K stands for Kibana. The ElasticSearch team developed Kibana with the goal of having a useful tool for monitoring logs. Instead of running Linux commands on the console to identify exceptions in production, simply navigate around and track the context from the Kibana.

Grafana, on the other hand, is developed as a generic monitoring solution that can be used to monitor and analyze pretty much anything. This is a very high-level overview of the differences between the two tools.

Q: How do I create a drop down menu in Grafana dashboard based on a Sysdig metrics label?
Ans:

To do that you need to go in your dashboard, then :

Settings > Variables > New
• In the General block, you have to select Query as the variable type.
• In the Query Options block, you can select your datasource in the dropdown
• Then, in the same block, you'll have a Query textfield. Here you have to use the grafana function called label_values You can refer the documentation for this function.
So basically, for our case, to retrieve the label value for the region label, will have to do something like this :

label_values(cloud_storage_request_count,region)