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

Summary

We've covered a lot of ground in this chapter. We wrote a simple Python ETL script to scrape data from a web-based API and import that dataset into InfluxDB. We learned key concepts behind time and field value aggregations. Then, we tried out different drawing styles and learned how to instruct Grafana on how to connect the dots when there is missing data.

We also set axis units, converted our data from one unit of measure into another, and displayed multiple series with different units on the same graph. Finally, we worked with the legend display to make it more space-efficient and aesthetically pleasing.

In the next chapter, we'll be diversifying our display panels so that they include panels that are more specialized in functionality. While these panels are somewhat more limited, they still complement the graph panel by characterizing data in truly unique ways.