Grafana Foundations
A practical introduction to Grafana dashboards, data sources, and visual best practices for engineering teams getting started with observability.
This page describes a typical starting point for teams new to Grafana. The actual content is shaped around your stack, your data sources, and the problems your team is trying to solve. No two sessions are the same.
What this training covers
Most teams pick up Grafana by copying dashboards from the internet and tweaking them until something looks right. That works until it doesn’t. This training gives you a proper foundation: how Grafana thinks about data, how to query it well, and how to build dashboards that are actually useful when something breaks at 2am.
By the end of the day, you’ll know how to connect Grafana to your data sources, write queries that answer real questions, and design dashboards your whole team can read without a guided tour.
Agenda
- Grafana in your observability stack
- Connecting and securing data sources
- Query fundamentals across PromQL, LogQL, and SQL
- Dashboard layout patterns and storytelling
- Alerting and on-call handoffs that reduce noise
Labs
- Build dashboards from your own metrics and logs
- Create multi-stage alerting pipelines aligned to SLOs
- Customise dashboards with templating and variables
Who this is for
Engineering teams that have Grafana running but aren’t getting much value out of it yet. Developers who want to understand what their services are doing. Platform teams onboarding colleagues onto an existing observability stack.
This training is built around your situation
Before the session, I want to understand what you’re working with. What data sources do you have? What does your current dashboarding look like? What’s not working? The agenda above is a guide, not a contract. If your team needs more time on alerting or has a specific migration challenge, we adjust.
Get in touch at info@obserfana.com to talk through what makes sense for your team.