Book Image

Observability with Grafana

By : Rob Chapman, Peter Holmes
Book Image

Observability with Grafana

By: Rob Chapman, Peter Holmes

Overview of this book

To overcome application monitoring and observability challenges, Grafana Labs offers a modern, highly scalable, cost-effective Loki, Grafana, Tempo, and Mimir (LGTM) stack along with Prometheus for the collection, visualization, and storage of telemetry data. Beginning with an overview of observability concepts, this book teaches you how to instrument code and monitor systems in practice using standard protocols and Grafana libraries. As you progress, you’ll create a free Grafana cloud instance and deploy a demo application to a Kubernetes cluster to delve into the implementation of the LGTM stack. You’ll learn how to connect Grafana Cloud to AWS, GCP, and Azure to collect infrastructure data, build interactive dashboards, make use of service level indicators and objectives to produce great alerts, and leverage the AI & ML capabilities to keep your systems healthy. You’ll also explore real user monitoring with Faro and performance monitoring with Pyroscope and k6. Advanced concepts like architecting a Grafana installation, using automation and infrastructure as code tools for DevOps processes, troubleshooting strategies, and best practices to avoid common pitfalls will also be covered. After reading this book, you’ll be able to use the Grafana stack to deliver amazing operational results for the systems your organization uses.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Get Started with Grafana and Observability
5
Part 2: Implement Telemetry in Grafana
10
Part 3: Grafana in Practice
15
Part 4: Advanced Applications and Best Practices of Grafana

Displaying Data with Dashboards

Now that we have explored the topics covered in the earlier chapters together, we have a good understanding of the many ways to retrieve accessible data from Grafana. We will now create our first dashboard together and look at different ways to visualize our data. We will then explore concepts and techniques that help you communicate effectively with your dashboards and reduce cognitive load for your viewers. We will look at a few resources for inspiration out in the community to inspire you with your dashboards. Then, to finish, we will share guidance around managing your dashboard artifacts as they grow to help you get organized.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

  • Creating your first dashboard
  • Developing your dashboard further
  • Using visualizations in Grafana
  • Developing a dashboard purpose
  • Advanced dashboard techniques
  • Managing and organizing dashboards
  • Case study – an overall...