An introduction to the open source software Grafana, a graph and dashboard composer with rich metric query builders and visualizations. Learn why Grafana has quickly become the leading frontend for time series databases like Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. We then take a look at how we can improve the state of metric visualization, and how can we better integrate metrics with alerting.

1. grafana.org
github.com/grafana/grafana
@grafana
Grafana and the Future of Metrics
Visualization

2. Torkel Ödegaard
● Stockholm, Sweden
● @torkelo

4. What is Grafana?

5. Time series visualization
Infrastructure monitoring
Application metrics
Industrial sensors
Home automation
Weather
Process control

7. Why Build Grafana?

8. Agile
TTD

9. Continuous Delivery
Micro Services

10. Death Star Architecture

12. Observability

13. Time Series Database (TSDB)
Write & Query API designed for Time Series

14. Graphite

15. apps.server1.counter.login.count 10 1398969187
INPUT

16. prod.apps.*.counter.login.count
QUERY

17. sumSeries(prod.apps.*.counter.login.count)
QUERY

18. movingAverage(scaleToSeconds(prod.apps.*.counter.login.count, 1), 5min)
QUERY

19. timeShift(prod.apps.*.counter.login.count, 1d)
QUERY

20. Measure Anything, Measure Everything
2011
StatsD
stats.increment(“logins”)

21. Instrumentation

22. Build Dashboards

24. Low Adoption

25. Scratching your own itch

27. Accessable

28. movingAverage(scaleToSeconds(prod.apps.*.counter.login.count, 1), 5min)

32. Beautiful

35. Grafana Project
● First Release Jan 2014
● 13 feature releases
● 7180 stars on github
● 1055 forks
● 201 contributers

36. Data Sources
OpenTSDB Elasticsearch
InfluxDB
KairosDB
Prometheus
Graphite
Zabbix Gnocchi
OpenNMS DalmatinerDB
Druid
Cloudwatch

37. Demo

38. Feature Overview
● Advanced graphing
● Powerful query editors
● Dashboards
● Dynamic queries and dashboards
● Multi tenant user / organization support
● Client side & server side rendering of panels

39. Graphing features
● Multiple y-axis
● Many many y-axis units and formats (bytes, SI units, etc)
● Bars, lines, points
● Series overrides
● Select region to zoom
● Legend values and placement options
● Multiple stack groups

40. Summary

41. Observability
Metrics

42. Power
through
UX

45. Whats next for the Grafana Project
● More people
● More visualizations
● Alerting

46. Q & A
● grafana.org
● github.com/grafana/grafana
● @grafana
● @torkelo