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

Visualizing AWS telemetry with Grafana Cloud

There are two main ways in which you can visualize your AWS telemetry with Grafana Cloud:

  • Amazon CloudWatch data source: Amazon CloudWatch telemetry remains in AWS and Grafana is configured to remotely read the data at query time
  • AWS integration: AWS CloudWatch telemetry data is either sent to or scraped and stored in Grafana Cloud (logs in Loki and metrics in Mimir).

Let’s take a look at the differences between these two options to understand whether the integration option or the data source option best fits your use case.

Amazon CloudWatch data source

Grafana Cloud comes with support for Amazon CloudWatch, allowing you to query, trigger alerts, and visualize your data in Grafana dashboards. To read CloudWatch telemetry, you will need to configure the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions and provide the necessary authentication details in the data source configuration screen. This does not...