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

Detecting trends with aggregations

As we continue up the stack, let's now take a look at some server performance metrics. How about an obvious web server metric? Enter prometheus_http_requests_total to get an idea of how many requests have been served so far:

Well, this is a bit of a mess. You can't see all 22 of the time series—they're all stacked on top of each other and there's a vague warning about something monotonically increasing. As we saw in the previous section, it's no problem to apply filters—say, to filter out the GET method handlers—but then we'd still have a stack of nearly 20 individual series.

Applying aggregations to our query data

If only there were some way to combine all the individual data series into one. It turns out there is, and it's called an aggregation. We can actually tell Prometheus to apply an aggregation function (in this case, sum) after...