Introduction to Grafana

Tuesday, 14 May 2024

Introduction to Grafana

What is Grafana?

Web application for:

analytics
interactive visualization - often a component in monitoring stacks in combination with:

time series databases:

InfluxDB
Prometheus
Graphite

monitoring platforms:

Sensu
Icinga
Checkmk
Zabbix
Netdata
PRTG

SIEMs (Security Information and Event Management - collects logs and events, normalizing this data for further analysis that can manifest as visualizations, alerts, searches, reports, and more.):

Elasticsearch
Splunk

other data sources.

Produces charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources
Multi-platform

Microsoft Windows
Linux
macOS

Licenses:

open source
licensed Grafana Enterprise

additional capabilities
sold as a self-hosted installation or through an account on the Grafana Labs cloud service

Expandable through a plug-in system
Complex monitoring dashboards can be built via interactive query builders

How to start with Grafana Web Application?

Grafana web app shows a list of:

Connections
Dashboards

for data visualization
can be grouped into folders

Playlists

groups of dashboards that are displayed in a sequence
they can be used to cycle dashboards on TVs without user control

Snapshots

interactive, publicly available, point-in-time representations of dashboards

Library panels

Reusable panels that can be added to multiple dashboards

Grafana Connections

Data sources grouped by types:

Time series databases

Prometheus - Open source time series database & alerting
Graphite - Open source time series database
InfluxDB - Open source time series database
OpenTSDB - Open source time series database

Logging & document databases

Loki - Like Prometheus but for logs. OSS logging solution from Grafana Labs
Elasticsearch - Open source logging & analytics database

Distributed tracing

Jaeger - Open source, end-to-end distributed tracing
ore
AWS Application Signals - Data source for AWS Application Signals
Tempo - High volume, minimal dependency trace storage. OSS tracing solution from Grafana Labs.
Zipkin - Placeholder for the distributed tracing system.

Profiling

Grafana Pyroscope - Data source for Grafana Pyroscope, horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant continuous profiling aggregation system.
Parca - Continuous profiling for analysis of CPU and memory usage, down to the line number and throughout time. Saving infrastructure cost, improving performance, and increasing reliability.

MySQL - Data source for MySQL databases
Microsoft SQL Server - Data source for Microsoft SQL Server compatible databases
PostgreSQL - Data source for PostgreSQL and compatible databases

Cloud

Azure Monitor - Data source for Microsoft Azure Monitor & Application Insights
CloudWatch - Data source for Amazon AWS monitoring service
Google Cloud Monitoring - Data source for Google's monitoring service (formerly named Stackdriver)
Grafana Cloud - Hosted Graphite, Prometheus, and Loki

Enterprise plugins

Adobe Analytics - Adobe Analytics datasource
AppDynamics - AppDynamics integration and data source
Atlassian Statuspage - Atlassian Statuspage datasource
Aurora - Aurora data source
Azure CosmosDB - Azure CosmosDB datasource
Azure Devops - Azure Devops datasource
Catchpoint - Catchpoint datasource
Cloudflare - Cloudflare datasource
CockroachDB - CockroachDB datasource
DataDog - DataDog integration and data source
Drone - Drone datasource
Dynatrace - Visualize and explore Dynatrace data
GitLab - GitLab integration and datasource
Honeycomb - Honeycomb integration and datasource
Jira - Jira integration and datasource
MongoDB - MongoDB integration and data source
Netlify - Netlify datasource
New Relic - New Relic integration and data source
Oracle - Visualize and explore Oracle SQL
PagerDuty - PagerDuty datasource
SAP HANA® - SAP HANA® integration and data source
Salesforce - Salesforce integration and datasource
ServiceNow - ServiceNow integration and data source
Snowflake - Snowflake integration and data source
Splunk - Visualize and explore Splunk logs
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring - SignalFx integration and datasource
SumoLogic - SumoLogic integration and datasource
Wavefront - Wavefront integration and data source
Zendesk - Zendesk datasource

Others

Alertmanager - Add external Alertmanagers (supports Prometheus and Mimir implementations) so you can use the Grafana Alerting UI to manage silences, contact points, and notification policies.
GitHub - The GitHub data source plugin for Grafana lets you to query the GitHub API in Grafana so you can visualize your GitHub repositories and projects.
TestData - Generates test data in different forms

Grafana Dashboards

How to create a new Dashboard?

We can add a visualisation by selecting a data source and then querying and visualising data with charts, stats and tables or by creating lists, markdowns and other widgets.

There is also a drop-down menu in the context of the dashboard, with the same content:

Adding a visualization actually adds a new panel:

We can toggle a Table view and see data points as rows in a table instead of the graph:

In the right-hand side panel we can choose Visualisation type:

For example, Bar chart would look like this:

Suggestions tab show thumbnails for various visualisations:

Related panels can be grouped into rows.

How to use Amazon CloudWatch as Grafana data source?

Grafana admin can create a new Amazon CloudWatch data source by specifying the following:

Make sure that IAM user that Grafana will be using to authenticate to AWS has a proper access policy attached as per Amazon CloudWatch data source | Grafana documentation.