Grafana for security dashboards

Grafana is the tool of choice when you want full control over how your security dashboards look and behave, and you have the engineering ability to run it. It is open source, flexible, and very good at time series data, which is most of what a security program tracks over time.

What Grafana does well

It connects to almost anything. Prometheus, Postgres, Elasticsearch, cloud monitoring, you name it. The visualizations are clean and highly configurable. You build exactly the view you want rather than living inside someone else's template. And because it is open source, there is no per seat tax on letting people view dashboards.

For an engineering led security team, Grafana is hard to beat on flexibility.

Where Grafana struggles

It assumes you bring your own data, already in good shape. Grafana does not collect from your security tools, reconcile how each one counts things, or keep an auditable record of your numbers. It queries a data source and draws.

It also leans technical. Executives rarely want to live in Grafana, so for board reporting you often end up exporting to slides anyway.

The part Grafana does not handle

Grafana draws what your data source contains. If that source is a tangle of inconsistent exports with no shared definitions and no history, Grafana will render that tangle as a confident, good looking chart.

The work of getting your security data collected on a schedule, normalized to consistent definitions, and recorded so any number can be reproduced and traced, that happens before Grafana ever sees it. Grafana is the last mile. The data layer underneath is the part that decides whether the dashboard is trustworthy.

If you are running Grafana, you have already accepted the build it yourself path. Just be clear eyed that the visualization is the easy half. See the data layer beneath the dashboard for what the hard half involves, and security KPI system of record for how some teams give that layer a real home instead of a pile of scripts.

Back to the full security dashboard tool comparison.