Grafana: Quick Introduction
Grafana
Grafana is an open source software, mostly used for visualization and analytics.
It allows you to query and visualize data stored in external applications, acting like a presentation layer for your data.
This way it makes you understand your data and gain insights.
Grafana is handling 3 types of data: metrics, logs and traces.
Grafana can do much more than visualizations, but we’ll not consider them in this post.
Grafana Concepts
To use Grafana effectively we need to understand its basic concepts first.
- Plugin: Extends the functionality of Grafana by connecting a data source, adding a new type of panel etc.
- Data Source: Connects to an application, which holds the data you wanna analyze.
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Panel: A type of graphical representation of your data. Fetches data from a data source and visualizes it. You can query the data source, filter and transform the data etc. A graphical representation might be a type of chart, a table etc. In the image below you see a chart and its data traversing different stages:
- Dashboard: A set of panels visualizing a different aspect of your data. Usually you organize a related group of panels into a dashboard to have a holistic view of your application/system. You can create as many dashboards as you want. You see a dashboard on the top of the page.
Please find in the references section the links to documentation explaining these concepts in detail.
Demo
In the following we want to create a dashboard with a panel. The panel will display data residing in Prometheus.
But we’ve to install Grafana first. Please head over to Grafana and follow the instructions for your OS. After you’ve installed Grafana, open the URL http://localhost:3000 in your browser. Once you’ve entered the default username and password, you’ll see:
Create A Dashboard
We’ll create our first dashboard. Select the item Dashboard from the menu on the left. On the dashboards page, click on the button New dashboard to create a new dashboard, which will take you to the screen below:
Click on Add visualization. The new page requires you to select a data source. Please click on Prometheus as we want to connect to Prometheus to fetch data for our visualization. We should see something like:
From the Metric drop down box we select our custom metric home_temperature_in_celcius, which we did create in a previous post:
We can apply filtering and transformations to the data by using the provided UI elements:
Edit panel properties like title, time frame etc. and save the panel by clicking on Save dashboard and give your dashboard a name like Smart Home:
Now, click on the button Back to dashbarod on top, then on Exit edit.
We did finish creating a new dashboard. Our new dashboard named Smart Home should look like:
We’ve only one panel in our dashboard. You’re free to add more panels, which should relate to the subject of the dashboard - in our case smart home.
Grafana allows us to place the panels in the order we want using drag and drop etc.
Summary
We did introduce Grafana and talk about its basic components. After installing Grafana on our local machine we did create a custom dashboard consisting of a single panel.