What is a primary characteristic of Grafana?

Grafana is fundamentally designed as a visualization and analytics tool that excels at displaying data from various sources in real-time. It connects to various back-end data storage solutions, such as databases and time-series data stores, but does not store the data itself. This characteristic highlights its primary role as an interface for visualizing data rather than as a data repository. By leveraging its ability to create interactive dashboards and visual representations, users can analyze and monitor metrics from services and applications without managing the underlying data themselves. This makes Grafana an essential tool for observability and monitoring, allowing users to focus on insightful analytics without the burden of data storage infrastructure.