About Grafana
Grafana open source software enables you to query, visualize, alert on, and explore your metrics, logs, and traces wherever they are stored. 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.
After you have installed Grafana and set up your first dashboard using instructions in Getting started with Grafana, you will have many options to choose from depending on your requirements. For example, if you want to view weather data and statistics about your smart home, then you can create a playlist. If you are the administrator for an enterprise and are managing Grafana for multiple teams, then you can set up provisioning and authentication.
The following sections provide an overview of Grafana features and links to product documentation to help you learn more. For more guidance and ideas, check out our Grafana Community forums.
Explore metrics, logs, and traces
Explore your data through ad-hoc queries and dynamic drilldown. Split view and compare different time ranges, queries and data sources side by side. Refer to Explore for more information.
Alerts
If you’re using Grafana Alerting, then you can have alerts sent through a number of different alert notifiers, including PagerDuty, SMS, email, VictorOps, OpsGenie, or Slack.
Alert hooks allow you to create different notifiers with a bit of code if you prefer some other channels of communication. Visually define alert rules for your most important metrics.
Annotations
Annotate graphs with rich events from different data sources. Hover over 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—just control-click on a graph and input some text—or you can fetch data from any data source. Refer to Annotations for more information.
Dashboard variables
Template variables allow you to create dashboards that can be reused for lots of different use cases. Values aren’t hard-coded with these templates, so for instance, if you have a production server and a test server, you can use the same dashboard for both.
Templating allows you to drill down into your data, say, from all data to North America data, down to Texas data, and beyond. You can also share these dashboards across teams within your organization—or if you create a great dashboard template for a popular data source, you can contribute it to the whole community to customize and use.
Configure Grafana
If you’re a Grafana administrator, then you’ll want to thoroughly familiarize yourself with Grafana configuration options and the Grafana CLI.
Configuration covers both config files and environment variables. You can set up default ports, logging levels, email IP addresses, security, and more.
Import dashboards and plugins
Discover hundreds of dashboards and plugins in the official library. Thanks to the passion and momentum of community members, new ones are added every week.
Authentication
Grafana supports different authentication methods, such as LDAP and OAuth, and allows you to map users to organizations. Refer to the User authentication overview for more information.
In Grafana Enterprise, you can also map users to teams: If your company has its own authentication system, Grafana allows you to map the teams in your internal systems to teams in Grafana. That way, you can automatically give people access to the dashboards designated for their teams. Refer to Grafana Enterprise for more information.
Provisioning
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. You can script anything in Grafana.
For example, if you’re spinning up a new Kubernetes cluster, you can also spin up a Grafana automatically with a script that would have the right server, IP address, and data sources preset and locked in so users cannot change them. It’s also a way of getting control over a lot of dashboards. Refer to Provisioning for more information.
Permissions
When organizations have one Grafana and multiple teams, they often want the ability to both keep things separate and share dashboards. You can create a team of users and then set permissions on folders and dashboards, and down to the data source level if you’re using Grafana Enterprise.
Other Grafana Labs OSS Projects
In addition to Grafana, Grafana Labs also provides the following open source projects:
Grafana Loki: Grafana Loki is an open source, set of components that can be composed into a fully featured logging stack. For more information, refer to Grafana Loki documentation.
Grafana Tempo: Grafana Tempo is an open source, easy-to-use and high-volume distributed tracing backend. For more information, refer to Grafana Tempo documentation.
Grafana Mimir: Grafana Mimir is an open source software project that provides a scalable long-term storage for Prometheus. For more information about Grafana Mimir, refer to Grafana Mimir documentation.
Grafana Phlare: Grafana Phlare is an open-source software project for aggregating continuous profiling data. Continuous profiling is an observability signal that enables you to understand your workload’s resource (CPU, memory, etc.) usage to the exact line number. For more information about using Grafana Phlare, refer to Grafana Phlare documentation.
Dashboard anything. Observe everything.
Query, visualize, alert on, and understand your data no matter where it’s stored. With Grafana you can create, explore, and share all of your data through beautiful, flexible dashboards.
Why Grafana?
Unify your data, not your database
Grafana doesn’t require you to ingest data to a backend store or vendor database. Instead, Grafana takes a unique approach to providing a “single-pane-of-glass” by unifying your existing data, wherever it lives.
With Grafana, you can take any of your existing data- be it from your Kubernetes cluster, raspberry pi, different cloud services, or even Google Sheets- and visualize it however you want, all from a single dashboard.
Come together… right now… over me (sing it).
Data everyone can see
Grafana was built on the principle that data should be accessible to everyone in your organization, not just the single Ops person.
By democratizing data, Grafana helps to facilitate a culture where data can easily be used and accessed by the people that need it, helping to break down data silos and empower teams.
Of course, sometimes you don’t want Eric in Accounting to see everything, Grafana Cloud and Enterprise editions offer extensive security options.
Dashboards that anyone can use
Not only do Grafana dashboards give insightful meaning to data collected from numerous sources, but you can also share the dashboards you create with other team members, allowing you to explore the data together.
With Grafana, anyone can create and share dynamic dashboards to foster collaboration and transparency.
We don’t really mean anyone, especially that guy that talks about how much better it was when we had fax machines.
Flexibility and versatility
Translate and transform any of your data into flexible and versatile dashboards. Unlike other tools, Grafana allows you to build dashboards specifically for you and your team.
With advanced querying and transformation capabilities, you can customize your panels to create visualizations that are actually helpful for you.
We think you’re great the way you are, but who couldn’t be a bit more flexible?
“When you become a big business with all this data, you need to pull it together. And I think Grafana is the gel that pulls everything together from across the business to give us a real-time snapshot of how Utilita’s doing at any given moment. It’s incredibly valuable.”
Adrian Goater
Web Development Manager, Utilita
“We can audit our data to see which metrics have the highest cardinality, or to see which services are publishing the most metric series. This gives us an opportunity to know where to filter out metrics for the highest impact.”
Jake Utley
Senior Software Engineer, Hiya
“We not only track traditional technical and engineering metrics in Grafana. We also present much-needed operational data that various business teams use to get a pulse on the day-to-day health of the business.”
Carl Johnson
Director of Infrastructure and SRE, The Trade Desk
“It’s sort of like all signal, no noise. You call Grafana up and it just shows you what you want, which is really nice.”
Grafana: инструмент для удобной визуализации метрик мониторинга
«Если результат от запуска IT-проекта нельзя измерить — то как понять, что вы запустили нужный проект?», — говорят грамотные управленцы и бизнесмены. И с ними не поспоришь. Сейчас мы разберемся с тем, что такое Grafana, как она помогает принимать решения и кому нужен этот инструмент.
Метрики мониторинга, которых тысячи
Любой мало-мальски вменяемый IT-проект — это разные метрики. Среднее число активных пользователей в сутки, количество регистраций в неделю, средний чек на клиента, количество активных юзеров, пользующихся новой фичей, — это примеры метрик, с которыми приходится каждый день иметь дело управленцам и владельцам бизнеса. Конечно, это далеко не полный список — крупная компания легко может собирать показатели по тысячам параметров.
Аналитики как раз те люди, которые извлекают из метрик пользу. Они смотрят на колонки цифр и формируют гипотезы и рекомендации по тому, куда и как бизнес должен двигаться дальше.
Эти ребята в основном занимаются математикой и статистикой. Некоторые из них в состоянии самостоятельно писать запросы в базы данных, но это не их основная специальность. А раньше дела обстояли еще хуже — почти никто из аналитиков не умел работать с СУБД.
Поэтому, чтобы обеспечить аналитический отдел топливом в виде метрик, приходилось отвлекать программистов от работы и просить их выгрузить нужные значения из таблиц СУБД. Конечно, это сильно затрудняло процесс.
В итоге появилась Grafana — универсальный инструмент мониторинга, с помощью которого аналитики и даже некоторые менеджеры смогли сами ходить в системы хранения метрик и извлекать все нужные данные. И даже строить сложные графики с учетом множества разных параметров.
Grafana — все метрики мониторинга в одном месте
Grafana — универсальная обертка для работы с аналитическими данными, которые хранятся в разных источниках. Она сама ничего не хранит и не собирает, а является лишь универсальным клиентом для систем хранения метрик. Например, с помощью нее можно ходить за цифрами как в традиционную базу PostgreSQL, так и в специализированные аналитические системы типа Prometheus или Influx.
Графану можно подключать к любому хранилищу статистических данных. Разные отделы компании могут использовать разные СУБД и системы сбора статистики. Так вот, Grafana умеет работать с любой популярной системой хранения данных. Конечно, делает она это не сама — первоначальную настройку и подключение к СУБД выполняют администраторы. Но на этом их работа заканчивается — дальше аналитики могут самостоятельно строить свои запросы.
Системы хранения данных на рисунке выше — лишь малая часть того, куда Grafana может подключаться для отображения статистики. Если вам нужно что-то очень редкое — всегда можно найти и поставить дополнительные плагины. А их много — комьюнити вокруг инструмента очень активное и дружное.
При подготовке материала использовались источники:
https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/introduction/
https://grafana.com/grafana/
https://mcs.mail.ru/blog/grafana-instrument-udobnoy-vizualizatsii-metrik-monitoringa