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

Introducing RUM

RUM is the term used to describe the collection and processing of telemetry that describes the health of the frontend of your web applications. It gives us a bird’s-eye view of user transactions as they happen, live from the user’s browser all the way through to the backend system. The benefit of this telemetry is in the insight into the experience real users are having with the performance of your application.

Grafana implements RUM with a combination of the following:

  • The Grafana Faro Web SDK, which, when embedded in your web application, collects the following telemetry by default:
    • Web Vitals performance metrics
    • Unhandled exceptions
    • Browser environment information
    • Page URL changes
    • Session identification (for data correlation)
    • Activity traces

    In addition to the defaults, the SDK can be configured to send custom metadata, measurements, and metrics into Grafana to enhance Frontend Observability. The Faro Web SDK integrates with opentelemetry-js to...