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

Creating a high information density dashboard

In our first example, we'll be constructing a fairly detailed dashboard of graph panels. This dashboard is similar to the one you might find accompanying a metrics-driven server application. It's intended to provide a number of metric graphs that might also serve as the top layer for further drill-down exploration. In our example, we'll be assembling a series of graphs to cover the weather metrics we've scraped from the National Weather Service using the application we developed in Chapter 5, Visualizing Data in the Graph Panel.

If you've been following my instructions in the previous chapters, you're probably well aware of how much work goes into getting a panel just so, and you can be forgiven for being a little anxious about the idea of creating a lot of panels for a dashboard. It's a valid concern, and for these examples, I'm going to take you step-by-step, as well as offer some effort...