# Comparing TiDB Dashboard and Grafana
+ TiDB Dashboard is a built-in monitoring tool of the PD component
+ TiDB Dashboard includes features like Top SQL, Slow Queries, Key Visualizer, etc.
+ Grafana provides more fine-grained monitoring and performance metrics compared to TiDB Dashboard

------------------------------------------
TiDB Dashboard focuses on real-time, TiDB-specific diagnostics, including:
+ Top SQL: real-time and historical SQL execution data with latency and resource usage.
+ Slow Queries: analysis of slow-running SQL with execution plans and details.
+ Cluster Topology & Configurations: view live cluster layout, node roles, and settings.
+ Performance Profiling & Logs: CPU profiles, TiKV thread pools, and log access for troubleshooting.
TiDB Dashboard is ideal for root cause analysis and direct troubleshooting, offering rich contextual data and query-specific insights.

Grafana (with Prometheus) provides cluster-wide visualized time-series metrics, such as:
+ QPS (queries per second), latency, and connection counts for TiDB.
+ Region count, Raft messages, and read/write throughput for TiKV.
+ PD scheduling activity, store health, and heartbeat metrics.
+ Hardware resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O) across all components.
Grafana is optimized for monitoring and alerting, with customizable dashboards to track performance, anomalies and trends over time and notify on threshold breaches.