Grafana — Portfolio Projects
Build these projects to demonstrate real skills to employers. Each project is designed to be interview-worthy — something you can walk through in detail.
Project 1: Production-Grade Grafana Setup
Level: Beginner | Time: 1-2 days
Set up a complete, production-ready Grafana environment from scratch with proper configuration, security hardening, and monitoring.
Steps
Skills Demonstrated
GitHub Repo Name
grafana-production-setup
---
Project 2: RED-Method Dashboard-as-Code for a Multi-Service App
Level: Intermediate | Time: 2-3 days
Instrument a small multi-service app (e.g. a Node.js API + worker), scrape it with Prometheus, and build the full RED dashboard (Rate, Errors, Duration) as version-controlled JSON/Jsonnet rather than clicked together in the UI.
Steps
prometheus-client, exposing request count, error count, and a latency histogram
$service and $environment template variables so one dashboard covers every service
/etc/grafana/provisioning, not manual clicks
Skills Demonstrated
GitHub Repo Name
grafana-dashboard-as-code
---
Project 3: Unified Observability Stack (LGTM) with Trace-to-Log Correlation
Level: Advanced | Time: 4-5 days
Stand up the open-source LGTM stack — Loki (logs), Grafana (UI), Tempo (traces), and Prometheus/Mimir (metrics) — for a small instrumented app, and wire them together so a single click moves from a metric spike to the matching trace to the matching log lines.
Steps
tracesToLogs/tracesToMetrics so a trace span links directly to its Loki log lines and Prometheus metrics
Skills Demonstrated
GitHub Repo Name
grafana-lgtm-observability
---
Tips for Great Projects
Make it real. Solve an actual problem, even a small one. "Built a Kubernetes cluster to deploy my personal blog" is more impressive than a tutorial clone.
Document everything. A repo with a great README beats one with better code but no explanation. Include: what it does, why you built it, how to run it, what you learned.
Show your thinking. In interviews, you'll be asked: "Why did you choose X over Y?" Have a reason. Architecture decisions matter.
Iterate publicly. Make commits regularly. Employers look at commit history. 10 commits over a week shows real work; 1 commit with everything shows you copied it.