📊 Grafana

Grafana is the visualization and dashboarding layer of the homelab’s observability stack. It provides a unified interface for exploring metrics, building dashboards, and defining alert rules based on data collected by Prometheus. Grafana transforms raw time-series data into actionable insights for capacity planning, troubleshooting, and long-term analysis.

Grafana is deployed and managed using Ansible, ensuring consistent configuration, reproducible provisioning, and version-controlled infrastructure changes.

[!TIP] For a detailed look on how Ansible is used to manage the Grafana deployment, see Grafana Ansible Role.

[!TIP] For the dashboard-as-code workflow used in this repository, see Configure Grafana Dashboards Process. This process page covers how to add JSON dashboards, update role defaults, align provisioning tasks, and deploy safely.

🎯 Purpose

Grafana serves as the primary interface for:

Visualizing metrics from Prometheus
Building dashboards for compute, storage, networking, and applications
Monitoring long-term trends and resource usage
Creating alert rules for critical events
Providing a centralized observability portal for the entire homelab

Grafana integrates directly with Prometheus as its main datasource, but can also connect to Loki, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and other systems if needed.

🧰 Key Features

📊 1. Dashboards

Grafana dashboards provide real-time and historical views of:

Proxmox cluster performance
Ceph storage health
Docker media stack (Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, Sabnzbd, CalibreWeb, etc.)
Plex Media Server activity
Pi-hole DNS statistics
Synology and TrueNAS storage metrics
Nginx reverse proxy traffic and errors
Network device performance via SNMP

Dashboards can be imported from Grafana’s public library or built from scratch.

🗄️ 2. Datasources

The primary datasource in this homelab is:

Prometheus — metrics collection and storage

Additional datasources can be added as the environment grows.

🚨 3. Alerting

Grafana supports alerting through:

Unified Alerting (Grafana’s built-in alert engine)
Prometheus Alertmanager (optional integration)

Alerts can be routed to email, ntfy, Slack, Matrix, or other notification channels.

🔐 4. User Access & Authentication

Grafana supports:

Local users
OAuth2 / OIDC
Reverse proxy authentication

In this homelab, Grafana is protected behind the Nginx reverse proxy and OAuth2 authentication layer.

⚙️ Deployment

Grafana is deployed using Ansible, which manages:

Installation and version pinning
Datasource configuration (Prometheus)
Dashboard provisioning
Folder structure for dashboards
Alerting configuration
Service management
Plugin installation (if used)

This ensures that Grafana is fully reproducible and can be rebuilt or migrated without manual configuration drift.

📚 Dashboards in Use

The homelab uses a combination of:

Official Grafana dashboards
Community dashboards
Custom dashboards tailored to Proxmox, Ceph, Docker, Plex, Pi-hole, and storage systems

Dashboards are organized by category:

Compute — Proxmox, VMs, node_exporter
Storage — Ceph, Synology, TrueNAS
Applications — Media stack, Plex, CalibreWeb
Networking — SNMP devices, Pi-hole
Reverse Proxy — Nginx metrics and request flow