Grafana can turn all kinds of data into all kinds of visually appealing graphs and dashboards that can be customized in endless ways. Grafana monitoring can include annotations to show particular events across the panels. Adding an annotation is achieved by putting in a custom request to Elasticsearch. Doing so makes this show up on the graph as a vertical red line. Hovering over an annotation then gives you an event description and tags (for instance) so you can track when the server returns a 5xx error code or when there’s a system restart, for instance. This makes it particularly easy to investigate system behavior and to track particular events and their consequences in an application.
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SQL data sources
Authentication can be given to the users based on the roles they handle. Provisioning is another aspect admins would love to learn about. Also, if needed, they can work with the command-line interface to set up the application.
Otherwise people could be given a false sense of security if your dashboards aren’t telling the full story. In the modern era, where data is the new oil, tools like Grafana are not just beneficial, but essential. Throughout this article, we’ve unraveled how Grafana, an open-source platform, can transfigure raw data into valuable insights, enabling informed decision-making. It’s user-friendly interface, combined with its powerful functionality, makes it an indispensable tool for data visualization and monitoring. Additionally, a custom Docker image can function as a reusable template. Once you’ve created your image, you can utilize it to launch new Grafana instances with your preferred settings and plugins already installed.
What is Grafana? A look at its most important features for effective monitoring
In plain English, it provides you with tools to turn your time-series database (TSDB) data into beautiful graphs and visualizations. Where an organization has one instance of Grafana and several teams, they usually like to have the option to enforce some dashboard segregation. It used to be the case that this wasn’t possible because Grafana automatically made everyone’s dashboards accessible to everyone else. The later edition of multi-tenant mode meant that users could switch organizations but couldn’t share dashboards.
Grafana has a thriving community of enthusiasts who share reusable dashboards. Once you have integrated your first data source right from the Grafana UI, you can create dashboards to display this data via visualizations. Keep in mind that each data source has its unique query editor so that you can write specific queries that include the characteristics of the data being monitored.
Build data source plugin
Second, use a special “mixed” data source, which allows you to combine data from multiple data sources onto a single panel. Both are open-source and free solutions built to improve the monitoring of time-series data. On the one hand, Grafana is a leader in metrics visualization, while Prometheus is better for its metrics data collection and storage. Both tools can be combined into a robust monitoring solution suitable for monitoring all sorts of infrastructure and applications. Grafana was developed by Torkel Ödegaard in 2013 with the idea of creating something similar to Kibana but focusing on time-series data.
- The Grafana OSS plugin framework also enables you to connect other data sources like NoSQL/SQL databases, ticketing tools like Jira or ServiceNow, and CI/CD tooling like GitLab.
- You can learn some of the best practices and learn from the experts who have been creating these visuals for years.
- The data they obtain is often inaccurate and poorly structured without adequate visualizations.
- This is a very bird’s eye view of the difference between both tools.
- It allows users to ingest data from a wide range of sources, query and display it in customizable charts, set alerts for abnormal behavior, and visualise data on dashboards.
- You can control-click and type on a graph to create your annotations manually, or data can be fetched from any source to populate them.
Data services are collections of small, independent, and loosely coupled functions that enhance, organize, share, or calculate information collected and saved in data storage volumes. Now let’s see if we can trigger a Grafana Managed Alert by generating some traffic on our sample application. We have now created a dummy webhook endpoint and created a new Alerting Contact Point in Grafana. Now we can create an alert rule and link it to this new channel. In order to make this work, we also need an endpoint for our webhook channel to receive the alert. We will use requestbin.com to quickly set up that test endpoint.
Learn Grafana with online courses and programs
Grafana OSS provides you with tools to turn your time-series database (TSDB) data into insightful graphs and visualizations. The Grafana OSS plugin framework also enables you to connect other data sources like NoSQL/SQL databases, ticketing tools like Jira or ServiceNow, and CI/CD tooling like GitLab. Grafana enables businesses to fully understand the Whys and Hows of users or events in relation to their infrastructure or network. It’s particularly useful for security analytics teams, as it allows them to monitor events and users’ digital footprints step by step to see what they’re up to within their network.
Although Graylog dashboards can visualize this kind of data natively, they aren’t as adept at examining Grafana’s, so Grafana was adapted to visualize this analytical data. It can track application performance and load in real-time as well as retrospectively. Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console provides an enhanced performance metrics page to help identify potential causes of high CPU, memory, disk, and network resource usage spikes. Grafana was first released in 2014 by Torkel Ödegaard as an offshoot of a project at Orbitz. It targeted time series databases such as InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, and Prometheus, but evolved to support relational databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server. While it’s easy to click, drag, and drop to create a single dashboard, power users in need of many dashboards will want to automate the setup with a script.
Grafana and Loki: An Effective Integration
Learn how tracing, one of the pillars of observability, helps us deduce what’s happening in an application — and get a step-by-step demo of how… Now that your database is connected, you are ready to create your first dashboard! I’m going to create a dashboard showing stats about the CD database we connected in the previous section.
VictorOps’ Melanie Postma on how teams can leverage VictorOps and Grafana dashboards to reduce MTTR. Here’s how to get started with Prometheus Alertmanager and set up alert notifications with some popular methods and apps. With Grafana Cloud integrations, you grafana plugin development will have a Prometheus- and Grafana-based observability stack, including preconfigured dashboards and… Follow this step-by-step guide to using the OpenTelemetry .NET library to offload traces to Tempo and logs to Loki — and connect them in Grafana…
Dashboard variables
If you’d like to do this, just give the appropriate permission to the Grafana administrator. An open, massively scalable, software-defined storage system that efficiently manages petabytes of data. Software-defined storage that gives data a permanent place to live as containers spin up and down and across environments.