Grafana is a widely-used open-source user interface for metrics and infrastructure monitoring, particularly valuable for DevOps teams due to its ability to ingest data from popular time series databases like Prometheus. This tutorial outlines the installation and configuration of Grafana on macOS and Ubuntu, demonstrating how to execute initial metrics shipping, particularly focusing on its compatibility with Prometheus. It highlights how Grafana serves a similar function for metrics as Kibana does for logs, and details the installation process on an Ubuntu EC2 instance, including the use of CLI commands and configuration adjustments in the grafana.ini files. The guide also covers basic and advanced configuration options, logging settings, and the use of queries with various data sources, emphasizing the tool's built-in support for Prometheus and its capability to export metrics from other sources like Graphite and Metricbeat through plugins.