Book Image

Learn Grafana 7.0

By : Eric Salituro
Book Image

Learn Grafana 7.0

By: Eric Salituro

Overview of this book

Grafana is an open-source analytical platform used to analyze and monitoring time-series data. This beginner's guide will help you get to grips with Grafana's new features for querying, visualizing, and exploring metrics and logs no matter where they are stored. The book begins by showing you how to install and set up the Grafana server. You'll explore the working mechanism of various components of the Grafana interface along with its security features, and learn how to visualize and monitor data using, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Logstash, and Elasticsearch. This Grafana book covers the advanced features of the Graph panel and shows you how Stat, Table, Bar Gauge, and Text are used. You'll build dynamic dashboards to perform end-to-end analytics and label and organize dashboards into folders to make them easier to find. As you progress, the book delves into the administrative aspects of Grafana by creating alerts, setting permissions for teams, and implementing user authentication. Along with exploring Grafana's multi-cloud monitoring support, you'll also learn about Grafana Loki, which is a backend logger for users running Prometheus and Kubernetes. By the end of this book, you'll have gained all the knowledge you need to start building interactive dashboards.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Getting Started with Grafana
5
Real-World Grafana
13
Managing Grafana

Building the data server

Imagine for a moment that you are working for the public works department of a major city. Throughout the day, citizens use their phones and computers to report problems via the 311 service (https://www.open311.org/). You've been tasked with accessing the 311 data, building dashboards, and presenting them to various stakeholders within the city government. They will want to see how many of the various types of calls are made to the system, as well as how they are distributed across the city in various council districts.

Before we can build our dashboards, we'll need to get some data. Luckily, many major cities make anonymized 311 data publicly accessible in many popular data formats, including JSON and CSV. For this exercise, we'll be working with 311 data from the city of San Francisco. This data is available via their extensive data portal at https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Current-FY-Cases/iy63-pi3t.

To get...