# Use your Grafana workspace
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Your Grafana workspace is where you work on projects to create visualizations and explore your metrics. Set up and query data sources for your metrics. Create panels inside dashboards to view your metrics. Explore your data. Create alarms on your metrics.

The topics in this section explain how to use your Amazon Managed Grafana workspace.

**Note**  
Some topics vary based on the version of Grafana that you have in your workspace. For documentation specific to each version, see [Working in Grafana version 10](using-grafana-v10.md), [Working in Grafana version 9](using-grafana-v9.md), and [Working in Grafana version 8](using-grafana-v8.md). For information about upgrading your workspace from one version to another, see [Update your workspace version](AMG-workspace-version-update.md).

**Topics**
+ [What is Grafana?](#what-is-grafana)
+ [Connect to your workspace](connect-to-workspace.md)
+ [Users, teams, and permissions](Grafana-administration-authorization.md)
+ [Create your first dashboard](getting-started-grafanaui.md)
+ [Extend your workspace with plugins](grafana-plugins.md)
+ [Connect to data sources](AMG-data-sources.md)
+ [Working in Grafana version 12](using-grafana-v12.md)
+ [Working in Grafana version 10](using-grafana-v10.md)
+ [Working in Grafana version 9](using-grafana-v9.md)
+ [Working in Grafana version 8](using-grafana-v8.md)
+ [Change your preferences](change-your-grafana-preferences.md)
+ [Gather information for support](support-bundles.md)
+ [Classic dashboard alerts](old-alerts-overview.md)

## What is Grafana?
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 Grafana is open source visualization and analytics software. You can use it to query, visualize, alert on, and explore your metrics no matter where they are stored. 

 For example, if you want to view the metric, log, and trace data for your application, you might create a dashboard. If you are the administrator for a corporation and you manage Grafana for multiple teams, you might need to set up provisioning and authentication. 

 The following sections provide an overview of things you can do with your Grafana database and links so that you can learn more. 

### Explore metrics and logs
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 Explore your data through one-time, or ad hoc, queries and dynamically drilling down. You can split the view and compare different time ranges, queries, and data sources side by side. 

 For more information, see [Explore in Grafana version 10](v10-explore.md). 

### Alerts
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 If you’re using Grafana alerting, alerts can be sent through different alert notifiers, including the following: 
+ Amazon SNS
+ PagerDuty
+ VictorOps
+ OpsGenie
+ Slack

For more information, see [Alerts in Grafana version 10](v10-alerts.md).

### Annotations
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 Annotate graphs with rich events from different data sources. Pause on events to see the full event metadata and tags. 

 This feature, which shows up as a graph marker in Grafana, is useful for correlating data in case something goes wrong. You can create the annotations manually by pressing **Ctrl** while you choose a graph and then entering some text. Or you can fetch data from any data source. 

 For more information, see [Annotate visualizations](v10-dash-annotations.md). 

### Dashboard variables
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Use template variables to create dashboards that can be reused for many different use cases. With these templates, values aren’t hardcoded. This means that you can use a dashboard for multiple servers. For example, if you have a production server and a test server, you can use the same dashboard for both.

Templating helps you drill down into your data. For example, you can drill down from all data to North America data, down to Texas data, and beyond. You can also share these dashboards across teams within your organization. If you create a great dashboard template for a popular data source, you can also contribute it to the whole community to customize and use.

For more information, see [Variables](v10-dash-variables.md).