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

Designing a dashboard

Before we get started and work on a new dashboard, it's best to have a plan of action. Ask yourself a few questions:

  • What information do I want to convey?
  • What is the visual context for the dashboard?
  • What is most important; what is least important?

Let's take a look at these questions in more detail.

Conveying information

In the case or our dashboard, we will be building a dashboard that can be used to produce a forecast of the upcoming weather. For this purpose, will need to describe the following conditions:

  • Current temperature and dew point
  • Barometer reading and trend – rising, falling, or steady
  • Wind direction and speed
  • Visibility

We also want to know the current temperature as that will help us decide what to wear, for example. The dew point is an indication of humidity (and relative comfort, depending...