Grafana up and running — What is Grafana?
Introduction
This is the first of a series of posts I am writing about Grafana. I will be explaining to you what Grafana is and why it is a key tool and could represent a potential advantage for any business and monitoring area.
This introductory post will present an overall view about Grafana and don’t intends to be a installation guide (not yet), a technical comparison or a in-depth approach to its characteristics.
Below points are covered in this article:
- About Grafana
- Plugins
2.1 Data sources
2.2 Panels
3.3 Apps - Grafana Flavors
3.1 Grafana Cloud
3.2 Grafana Enterprise
3.3 Grafana Open Source - Use cases
- Resources
- Conclusions
1. About Grafana
In brief, Grafana stands out as a tool that provides monitoring capabilities using diverse statistical visualizations at the time that allows you to integrate multiple data sources over the same platform. Thus, for example, you could to build a unique dashboard that displays some panels with your last Elastic Search, Datadog and Prometheus metrics altogether with other panels that shows mixed statistical graphical representations based on information retrieved each one from different SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL queries.
One of the things I find very interesting, and even potential, about Grafana, is that provides you the capacity to develop the very specific metrics you need. You just will deal with the information that you need, no more than that. Think on it as a whiteboard that you can progressively fill with all the important information that your team and company needs. So, the versatility and possibilities you have with this tool are in really enormous.
Said that, I will be entering a little more in detail to summarize Grafana characteristics, so you can know it a little better.
2. Plugins
Grafana has an expanding universe of own and community plugins that are splitted into three sections:
- Data sources
- Panels
- Apps
This set of plugins contains every component that enriches Grafana capabilities in benefit of our needs. In order you know a little more about these, following I will be explaining about each one of these categories. The complete lists of Grafana Plugins can be consulted here.
2.1 Datasources
As mentioned before, Grafana can handle mixed data sources and there are many — a lot of them — supporting the monitoring of almost everything you could need to have at hand in your dashboard.
In order to use a data source you have to install a plugin. Next, you can see a screenshot of some of them but you can find the whole list and related information here:
2.2 Panels
In this section you have a complete set of visualizations to integrate in your dashboards, such as maps, pie charts, lists, clocks, histograms, tables, heat maps, etc.
2.3 Apps
These are bundles of data sources plus panels to give you joined the components you need to integrate a given technology.
3. Grafana Flavors
Grafana offers three alternatives to get the software up and running:
- Grafana Cloud
- Grafana Enterprise
- Grafana Open Source
3.1 Grafana Cloud
This is the SaaS version of Grafana, in which you pay a fee for the use of the software with all the inherited advantages of have it on the Cloud such as automatic updates and no need of management of a underlying infrastructure.
It has a free layer as well as a Pro and Advanced layer, between which, their characteristics and of course price varies. You can see a brief comparison of these layer in the next screenshot taken from the Grafana website:
For more information about characteristics and current prices, please refer to the Grafana Cloud pricing section.
3.2 Grafana Enterprise
Part of the Grafana Enterprise Stack which comprises:
- Grafana Enterprise,
- Prometheus Enterprise Metrics and
- Enterprise Logs.
This is the option to go if you prefer or need have a Grafana On-Premises installation over your current infrastructure having enterprise grade Grafana features such as compliance and security of your Grafana installation, access to enterprise plugins, collaboration for teams and professional support for Prometheus, Graphite and Grafana.
You will have to contact the Grafana team to get more information and request a demo tailored to your company case.
3.3 Grafana Open Source
This is the special version that Grafana team offers as Open Source project hosted in GitHub which, indeed, is one of the most popular Open Source projects out there.
Of course, this version contains the complete core of Grafana, and a license that allows individuals and companies to get the best of this software and use it openly on their projects.
You can see a brief of its license in the next screenshot:
You can install Grafana Open Source On-Premises, on any IaaS cloud vendor, run it over a Kubernetes cluster or as a Docker container wherever you want.
You can use it for commercial and business purposes. So… Well, I think you are made with this option.
You can get more information about this option on the Grafana Open Source website.
4. Use cases
Grafana can be used in a different set of scenarios such as:
- Business dashboards: Here you can get metrics based on your queries using SQL or NonSQL data sources. This empowers the executive level and decision makers to support their decisions based on visual statistics that relies on mixed data sources queries. All in one place.
- Technical Dashboards: You can collect metrics from other logging systems and display them in Grafana. You can get information of your containers, micro-services, IoT devices, cloud instances, physical machines, etc. The options are wide and diverse.
- Specific Company scopes: Your company could have different areas and each of them can create their own dashboards to support its needs.
- Automatic monitoring: Since dashboards in Grafana are JSON files. You could use a CI/CD strategy (i.e. Jenkins, Travis CI, Gitlab CI, etc.) and a Source Code Management System (i.e. Github, GitLab, etc.), in order to automate and manage the generation of automatic dashboards of your infrastructure or micro-services.
5. Resources
Next, I will leave you some useful links that can help you in your Grafana journey:
- Official Documentation — Here you can find about everything in Grafana
- Official Tutorials — Here you can learn how to manage and use Grafana
- Get started Webinar — This is a step by step guide get started tutorial
- Playground! — An ready and free to use Grafana to test and play with it
- Beginners guide to good dashboards design — A guide to improve your dashboards design
- Grafana Community website — The place to go when you need help with Grafana
6. Conclusions
We have spoken about Grafana, its advantages, capabilities and use cases. We also have pointed out the available options to get Grafana. However, It is important to say that there are and surely will appear more alternatives to have a Grafana installation running and working, such as the AWS Managed Service for Grafana.
Finally, we can conclude saying that Grafana provide us the following benefits:
- Centralized monitoring platform using heterogeneous data source
- You can configure Grafana alerts to contact your team in case your pre-defined thresholds are exceeded.
- You can set user level and team level permissions in your folders and/or dashboards in order to have a controlled collaborative work on your team.
- Its Open Source version can be used in our businesses needs and installed in our own underlying infrastructure using different strategies such as containers.
- Grafana provides excellent documentation, tutorials, playground and all needed so we can get the best of this tool
- Provides a SaaS offering that can be very interesting option for specific users.
- Provides a full support/compliance Enterprise version for the companies who need it.
In a next post, I will be taking more about the alternatives we have in order to get a Grafana installation up and running!
