As one of the most requested features in our last survey, and one of the most active open GitHub issues, alerting in Grafana is both an exciting and contentious topic. This presentation details our approach to tackling the alerting question in Grafana, and what’s coming down the pipe to allow people to manage their alerts side-by-side with their visualizations.

1. Alerting in grafana
Dieter Plaetinck
Grafanacon 2015 NYC

2. Dieter Who?
• Graph-Explorer, metrics 2.0
• graphite-ng, carbon-relay-ng
• anthracite
• graphite-influxdb, influx-cli, whisper-to-influxdb
• Bosun ~ graphite
• http://dieter.plaetinck.be/tags/monitoring/

3. quixotic

4. quix·ot·ic
/kwikˈsädik/
adj
Idealistic without regard to practicality.

7. Anthony • Dieter • Matt • Raj • Torkel
https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/2209

8. Idealizeddesign
http://www.ida.liu.se/~steho87/und/htdd01/AckoffGuidetoIdealizedRedesign.pdf
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/idealized-design-how-bell-labs-imagined-and-created-the-telephone-system-of-the-future/

9. brainstorm

10. Scope of alerting

11. Scope of alerting

12. Scope of alerting

13. UXdriven

14. syndrome
second
system

15. saying no.

16. Learning
Grafana
from

17. Prevent people from doing
stupid things

18. Prevent people from doing
stupid things
Prevent people from doing
smart things

20. Focus
power users
on

21. Finding the balance
on a small budget

22. really

23. really

24. really

25. HARD

26. prototype
iterate

27. evolvable
design

28. userworkflow

30. mockups!

40. Dashboard level

44. Global level

48. Grafana:
data viz
alert config
alert state viz

49. Grafana:
data viz
alert config
alert state viz
Handler:
alert scheduling
alert execution
notifications

50. grafana api → handler
bosun.org
nagios.org
sensuapp.org
github.com/arachnys/cabot
github.com/scobal/seyren
...

51. “batteries
included, but
removeable”

52. Time to vote

53. Why alerting
INGrafana

54. why:
unified workflow

55. why:
integration

56. why:
power through UX

57. •Workflow is key
•Composability & compatibility
•Handler integrations. <3 community.
•Prototype coming in Grafana 2.x
Conclusion

58. https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/2209
Q&A