Grafana Observability

One pane of glass over everything you run.

Operational data tends to scatter: metrics in one tool, logs in another, traces somewhere else, each with its own login, its own query language and its own bill. When something breaks at 2am, jumping between three dashboards to work out what happened wastes the minutes that matter. Grafana is the open source observability platform that pulls it all together. Metrics, logs and traces land in one interface, on dashboards your teams actually use, with alerting that reaches the right people. Node runs Grafana and the data stores behind it as a managed service, so you get enterprise observability without per-metric pricing or the burden of operating the stack yourself.

What Grafana is and why it is the standard for observability

Grafana is an open source platform for visualising, exploring and alerting on operational data. Rather than storing data itself, it connects to the systems that do, then turns that data into dashboards, exploration views and alerts. It has become the de facto standard for observability dashboards across the industry, used by small teams and the largest technology organisations alike.

Its strength is breadth. Grafana connects to more than a hundred data sources out of the box, so a single dashboard can show application metrics from Prometheus, server and network metrics from Zabbix, log data from Loki, distributed traces from Tempo, and business data straight from PostgreSQL or MySQL, side by side. The whole picture sits in one place instead of being spread across disconnected tools.

Because Grafana and the open source data stores around it have no per-host, per-metric or per-user licensing, the platform scales with your environment rather than your budget. Node runs it as a managed service, providing the platform, the data stores, the dashboards and the operations expertise, so you get the capability without running it yourself.

The observability stack we run

Grafana is the interface, but a complete observability platform needs data stores behind it. Node deploys and manages the full open source stack as one integrated service.

Metrics with Prometheus - Prometheus collects and stores time-series metrics from your servers, containers, databases and applications, scraping endpoints on a schedule and retaining the history Grafana queries. For large or multi-cluster environments we run Mimir for long-term, horizontally scalable metric storage.

Logs with Loki - Loki aggregates logs from across your systems and makes them searchable alongside your metrics. Because it indexes labels rather than full log content, it stores large log volumes cost-effectively, and its query language mirrors Prometheus so the two feel consistent in Grafana.

Traces with Tempo - Tempo stores distributed traces that follow a single request across the services it touches. When a user action is slow, the trace shows exactly which service and which call introduced the delay.

Collection with the OpenTelemetry Collector - we instrument your applications and infrastructure using OpenTelemetry, the vendor-neutral standard for telemetry, so the data feeding your dashboards is portable and never locked to one vendor's agent.

Dashboards built for the people who use them

A dashboard nobody understands is noise. We design dashboards around the audience, so each team sees what matters to them without wading through irrelevant data.

Operational dashboards - real-time views for engineers showing the health of the systems they own: request rates, error rates, latency, resource utilisation and saturation, with the detail needed to diagnose a live problem.

Service and executive dashboards - higher-level views that show whether key services are meeting their targets, presented so they can be read without infrastructure expertise.

Business dashboards - Grafana queries business data sources directly, so operational health and business metrics, such as orders, signups or transaction volumes, can sit on the same screen and reveal how the two relate.

Templated and reusable - dashboards use variables so one definition serves many systems, environments or customers, and we manage them as code so they are version-controlled, reviewable and reproducible rather than clicked together by hand.

Alerting and correlation

Visibility only helps if problems reach someone who can act. Grafana's unified alerting evaluates rules across all your data sources and routes notifications where they need to go.

Multi-source alert rules - alert on a Prometheus metric, a pattern in your Loki logs or a threshold on business data, all from one alerting engine with one set of policies.

Routing and escalation - notifications go to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Opsgenie or any webhook, with grouping, scheduling and escalation so the right people are reached and alerts that go unacknowledged move up the chain.

Correlated investigation - because metrics, logs and traces share one interface, an alert on a latency spike links straight to the logs and the distributed trace behind it. Root-cause analysis happens in one tool instead of three, which is the whole point of bringing the data together.

How Grafana fits with the rest of your platform

Grafana is the observability layer over everything Node manages for you. It reads metrics from our Zabbix monitoring platform so infrastructure and application observability live side by side. It visualises the health of Apache Kafka, Apache Airflow and the wider automation stack, surfaces Keycloak authentication activity, and reports on the Kubernetes clusters we run as part of your managed platform. The result is one observability platform across your entire managed environment rather than a separate dashboard for every technology.

How Node runs Grafana for you

We operate Grafana and its data stores as a fully managed service, not a server you have to maintain.

Deployment - we deploy Grafana, Prometheus, Loki and Tempo in a production, high-availability configuration, sized to your data volumes and retention requirements.

Instrumentation - we instrument your applications and infrastructure with OpenTelemetry and build the data sources, so dashboards reflect what your systems are actually doing.

Dashboard and alert design - we design the dashboards and alert rules with your teams and manage them as code, so they evolve with your environment.

Upgrades and operations - we test and apply upgrades, manage retention and storage costs, monitor the monitoring platform itself, and respond when something needs attention.

Your infrastructure or ours - hosted on Node's UK infrastructure or deployed into your own environment, on-premises or in your cloud accounts, with the same managed service either way.