Grafana Overview
Grafana is the unified observability UI for BizFirst Observe. It connects to Loki (logs), Prometheus (metrics), and Tempo (traces) simultaneously — providing a single login, single set of dashboards, and single alerting system for all three signal types.
Three Data Sources, One UI
Grafana's data source plugin architecture is what makes it the universal observability UI. Each storage backend is a different data source with its own query language:
| Data Source | Query Language | Used For | Panel Types |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loki | LogQL | Log stream queries, log volume metrics | Logs, Time Series, Stat |
| Prometheus | PromQL | Metric queries, alerting, SLIs | Time Series, Gauge, Bar chart, Table |
| Tempo | TraceQL / TraceId | Trace search, trace detail | Traces (waterfall), Node Graph |
Grafana's Core Capabilities
Dashboards
Pre-built and custom dashboards. Dashboard variables make panels multi-tenant. Panels can mix data from all three sources. Export/import as JSON.
Explore
Ad-hoc query tool. Split view for side-by-side log + trace. Live streaming of logs. No dashboard required — ideal for incident investigation.
Alerting
Unified alerting across all data sources. Contact points: Slack, email, PagerDuty, webhook. Notification policies, mute timings, silences.
Access Control
Organizations, teams, roles. Dashboard folder permissions. Data source access control (Grafana Enterprise). LDAP/SSO integration.
Pre-Built BizFirstGO Dashboard List
| # | Dashboard Name | Primary Data Source | Audience |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Flow Studio Overview | Prometheus + Loki | Operations, engineering leads |
| 2 | Node Performance | Prometheus | Platform engineers |
| 3 | HIL Analytics | Prometheus + Loki | Process owners, operations |
| 4 | EdgeStream Throughput | Prometheus | Integration engineers |
| 5 | Octopus Agent Performance | Prometheus | AI team |
| 6 | Tenant Health | Prometheus | Customer success, operations |
| 7 | API Latency | Prometheus | Backend engineers |
| 8 | Error Analysis | Loki | Developers, on-call engineers |
| 9 | Trace Explorer | Tempo | All engineers |
| 10 | Infrastructure | Prometheus (Node Exporter) | Platform engineers |
Dashboard Variables
All BizFirstGO dashboards use template variables to scope queries to the selected tenant and environment:
# Variable: $tenant
# Type: Query (Loki)
# Query: label_values({job="processengine"}, tenant_id)
# Populates dropdown with all tenant IDs seen in the last 24 hours
# Variable: $environment
# Type: Custom
# Values: production, staging, development
# Variable: $node_type
# Type: Query (Prometheus)
# Query: label_values(bizfirst_node_execution_duration_seconds_count, node_type)
# Using variables in panel queries:
rate(bizfirst_workflow_executions_total{tenant_id="$tenant", environment="$environment"}[5m])