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

Infrastructure data technologies

So far in this chapter, we have focused on implementations that work well for cloud technologies and containerized platforms. Underneath all of the abstraction are physical components, the servers running the workloads, the network and security devices handling communications, and the power and cooling components that keep things running. These have not dramatically changed over time and neither has the telemetry reported by the logs and metrics. Let’s take a look at the common infrastructure components and standards used in this area.

Common infrastructure components

Infrastructure can largely be categorized into some broad categories, as we will discuss in the following sections. The types of data you can collect will differ on the category of the component.

Compute or bare metal

Servers are often referred to as bare metal or compute; these are physical devices that are used for computation. Often, these systems would run virtualized...