Grafana is a metrics dashboard and visualization system, mostly commonly used as the display side of a full metrics and monitoring system . A while back on the Fediverse I praised it for good reason :

I may snark on Grafana the company, but Grafana the dashboard system is a genuine marvel. I have been around as a Unix sysadmin long enough that I've seen 90s and 00s era 'enterprise' monitoring and dashboard systems (from a distance). They cost a lot, were entirely closed and proprietary, and which didn't look half as good (or have half the functionality) as a Grafana dashboard I can build myself.

But Grafana is not merely an impressive piece of software; it's an impressive piece of web based software. Grafana dashboards are web pages and are typically built in a GUI through the web. So today I also said :

To extend this, Grafana the dashboard system is not only a genuine marvel, it's a genuine marvel of the (relatively) modern web, yes JavaScript and all. It has a ton of fluid interactions (both in viewing and building dashboards) that look quite a lot like native app features, but it's all done through the browser instead.

(And in the large scale of things it's not so long ago that our 'dashboard' systems were displaying hard-coded graphs by rendering PNGs on the server.)

It wasn't that long ago that the state of the art for web "dashboards" was hard-coded RRDtool or Xymon web pages that might display one or a few graphs that were created by rendering data on the server to PNGs and then displaying the PNGs in only slightly interactive HTML. If you wanted to change the time range, the server re-rendered new PNGs, and you usually picked the time range through some sort of form interface. This was a painful enough exercise that our old Xymon based monitoring system had almost no dashboards and almost no one ever looked at the dashboards we had.

When we moved from Xymon to Grafana (and Prometheus) , the shift felt quite dramatic for me. It was sometimes hard to believe I could do what I was doing in a web application; it felt like magic (good magic). And my use of Grafana has been relatively basic. The university's central IT people built a Grafana dashboard for university wireless information which shows a map of each campus, overlaid with current counts of active wireless connections in each building, and you can select a building to see statistics over time for that building.

(The dashboards aren't available to unauthenticated people but the landing page is here , which means that the central IT people consider this good enough for public visibility. There's currently also an older status page where the usage graphs are the old 'rendered PNGs' experience.)

Of course people have been doing sophisticated web applications for a while (Google Maps is probably the starting point, or at least the most well known of them). But Grafana is open source software (although the company is VC funded) and it runs as a standalone program on ordinary hardware. And thanks to browsers enabling minority platforms I can use it from a Linux machine.

The modern web is sometimes a decidedly unpleasant place, with mandatory JavaScript shoving on-page popups and other things in your face, and intrusive advertising, and all of those ills. But it doesn't have to be that way and these (semi-)modern browser technologies can be used for good, to enable things that would have been at least infeasible in the old world.

(Since Grafana has been pretty capable for more than a decade now, it's hard to say it requires truly modern web technology. But I still think of this level of interactive JavaScript and drawing and so on, creating a native application like GUI interface, to be 'modern web' as opposed to the old HTML web that you find here on Wandering Thoughts .)