Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.
This topic lists words and abbreviations that are commonly used in the Grafana documentation and community.
Dashboard
A set of one or more panels, organized and arranged into one or more rows, that provide an at-a-glance view of related information.
Data source
A file, database, or service providing the data. Grafana supports a several data sources by default, and can be extended to support additional data sources through plugins.
Exemplar
An exemplar is any data that serves as a detailed example of one of the observations aggregated into a metric. An exemplar contains the observed value together with an optional timestamp and arbitrary labels, which are typically used to reference a trace.
Explore
Explore allows a user to focus on a building a query. User can refine the query to return the expected metrics before building a dashboard.
Graph
A commonly-used visualization that displays data as points, lines, or bars.
Panel
Basic building block in Grafana, composed by a query and a visualization. Can be moved and resized within a dashboard.
Plugin
An extension of Grafana that allows users to provide additional functionality to enhance their experience. The types of plugins currently supported are:
App plugin: Extends Grafana with a customized experience. It includes a set of panel and data source plugins, as well as custom pages.
Data source plugin: Extends Grafana with support for additional data sources.
Panel plugin: Extends Grafana with additional visualization options.
Query
Used to request data from a data source. The structure and format of the query depend on the specific data source.
Time series
A series of measurements, ordered by time. Time series are stored in data sources and returned as the result of a query.
Trace
An observed execution path of a request through a distributed system. For more information, refer to [What is Distributed Tracing?](https://opentracing.io/docs/overview/what-is-tracing/)
Transformation
Transformations process the result set of a query before it’s passed on for visualization.
