Learn Observability with the LGTM Stack - Advanced Grafana Features

#Introduction

Since episode 5, you've used Grafana for basic dashboards. But Grafana hides many capabilities below the surface: unified alerting, Explore mode, data transformations, the plugin ecosystem, and even enterprise features.

This episode opens up those layers. When you're done, you'll know which features are most worth learning for your team's needs.

#Advanced Alerting

#Unified Alerting

Grafana unifies all alerting into a single system — unified alerting:

• Alert groups: group alerts by labels.
• Notification policies: determine alert delivery rules.
• Contact points: notification destinations like email, Slack, and webhooks.
• Mute timings: silence alerts on certain schedules.
• Alert instances: every label combination of one rule becomes an alert instance.

rule -> instance -> notification policy -> contact point

The rule -> instance -> notification policy -> contact point pattern is the complete modern Grafana alerting flow.

#The Explore Interface

#Free Exploration Mode

Explore is a query space without having to create a dashboard:

• Ad-hoc querying: write queries directly to any data source.
• Logs exploration: explore logs interactively with LogQL.
• Trace exploration: search traces with TraceQL.
• Metrics exploration: explore metrics with PromQL.
• Split view: compare two queries side by side.

left: error metrics | right: related trace

The pattern left: error metrics | right: related trace uses split view to see the correlation between data directly.

#Advanced Dashboards

#Transformations and Overrides

• Transformations: modify query results within a panel — for example joins, ratios, or sorting.
• Overrides: apply special settings to certain series or fields.
• Thresholds: color values based on thresholds.
• Value mappings: translate numbers into text, for example 1 into "Up".
• Links and drilldowns: links from one panel to another or to Explore.
• Annotations: mark events like deployments on the timeline.

thresholds:
  steps:
    - color: green
      value: null
    - color: red
      value: 80

The thresholds configuration makes values above 80 red — a common error rate panel pattern.

#The Plugin Ecosystem

#Three Plugin Types

• Panel plugins: new visualization types beyond the built-in ones.
• Data source plugins: connectors to new backends, including custom APIs.
• App plugins: integrated applications like Grafana SLO and Grafana OnCall.

Plugins are developed with React and TypeScript. The Grafana Marketplace provides hundreds of ready-to-install plugins — including the k6 plugin for episode 32.

#Enterprise Features

Paid Grafana Enterprise features for large organizations:

• Reporting: scheduled PDF reports for management.
• SAML authentication: enterprise-level single sign-on.
• Enhanced RBAC: more granular access control.
• Audit logs: a trail of user activity.
• Vault integration: centralized secret storage.
• Usage insights: dashboard usage statistics.

audit_logs:
  enabled: true
  retention: 30d

Enable audit_logs: enabled: true when security compliance becomes a requirement — details are covered in episode 33.

#Closing

In episode 31 you understood unified alerting with notification policies, the Explore interface for free exploration, transformations and overrides for dynamic dashboards, the three plugin types, and enterprise features for large organizations.

The key takeaways:

• Unified alerting combines rules, policies, and contact points.
• Explore is the place for quick queries without dashboards.
• Transformations and overrides strengthen panels.
• Plugins add panels, data sources, and applications.
• Enterprise features serve compliance and organizational scale.

In the next episode 32 we'll discuss performance testing and benchmarking — integrating k6 with Grafana, load testing tools like avalanche and loggen, establishing performance baselines, and capacity testing with stress, soak, and spike tests. Your observability will be tested under real pressure.