Explain Grafana's architecture and main components.

Grafana's architecture consists of several key components:

• Grafana Server: The core application that serves the web interface and APIs
• Database: Stores dashboard configurations, users, organizations, and metadata (SQLite, MySQL, or PostgreSQL)
• Data Sources: External systems that provide data (Prometheus, InfluxDB, CloudWatch, etc.)
• Dashboards: Collections of panels that visualize data
• Panels: Individual visualization components (graphs, tables, single stats)
• Plugins: Extend functionality (data source plugins, panel plugins, app plugins)
• Alerting Engine: Handles alert rules, notifications, and alert management
• Authentication: Handles user authentication and authorization

The server communicates with data sources through their respective APIs or query languages, processes the data, and renders visualizations in the web interface.