What is the visualization layer?
The visualization (or dashboard) layer is the place where you actually look at the metrics, build dashboards, run ad-hoc queries, and drill down into incidents.
It sits on top of the storage (VictoriaMetrics in our case) and queries it via PromQL.
It doesn’t store data itself, and it doesn’t scrape anything.
In our stack, this layer is Grafana, the de-facto standard for metrics visualization.
Why Grafana
A few reasons it became the standard:
- Multi-datasource: speaks Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Jaeger, and ~70 others. The same dashboard can mix data from multiple sources in different panels.
- Open-source:, no vendor lock-in.
- Massive dashboard ecosystem: grafana.com/dashboards has thousands of community-maintained, ready-to-import dashboards. Often you don’t need to write anything, just import.
- PromQL native, so the queries you write here transfer 1:1 to Prometheus.