What is Grafana and how does it relate to Prometheus?
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Quick Answer
Grafana is a visualization and alerting layer; it queries data sources like Prometheus but stores no metrics itself.
Detailed Answer
Grafana connects to time-series and log backends (Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, SQL, cloud) and renders dashboards and alerts. It holds no metric data of its own — a slow dashboard is almost always a slow query in the underlying data source, not Grafana. Prometheus scrapes and stores; Grafana reads and displays.
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Interview Tip
Emphasize the separation of concerns: storage vs visualization.
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