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:

• 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

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.

How to migrate a dashboard from one to another instance of Grafana?

Click on Share icon which is to the right of the dashboard name:

Click on Export tab and tick Export for sharing externally checkbox:

Save the file. In another Grafana instance, click the Import button:

And then upload the exported JSON file:

Make sure you select the correct data source (which needs to be set up in the same way as corresponding data source in the origin Grafana instance):

Click Import and dashboard will appear, with all the panels within.

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