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

Tracing protocols and best practices

Tracing, or as it is more commonly referred to, distributed tracing, tracks application requests as they are made between services of a system. It allows you to follow a single request through an entire system or look at the aggregate data over requests to better understand distributed behavior.

This capability provides software developers (Diego), operators (Ophelia), and service managers (Steven) with valuable tools that enable an understanding of the flow of logic that is essential for troubleshooting. Instrumenting your code by adding traces helps you easily pinpoint almost any issue or at least have a clear indicator of where the problem could be. Distributed tracing uses the concepts of spans and traces to capture this data. Let’s examine these in more detail.

Spans and traces

The trace record is the parent object that represents the data flow or execution path through the system being observed. Each trace will contain one...