Introducing the LightStep Plugin for Grafana
February 13, 2018 | Matthew Dolan
At LightStep, we’re always looking for ways to make it easier for our customers to monitor and analyze their application performance data in ways that fit seamlessly with their preferred workflows. This includes creating integration points to their DevOps environments.
We’re excited to release the LightStep plugin for Grafana today. Grafana, a popular open source analytics platform, consolidates metrics from different applications and databases into a single dashboard, so teams can more easily collaborate on cross-functional projects. With this new plugin, you can create time-series graphs from LightStep [x]PM’s unique tracing data and insights.
The plugin is open source and available now on GitHub.
Easy To Install, Our Best Features Integrated into Grafana
The LightStep plugin is easy to install just like any other Grafana plugin. You can use the grafana-cli tool or install it manually. You can then add [x]PM graphs into your existing Grafana dashboards.
The plugin allows you to monitor latency data derived from [x]PM and lets you display it the way you want in Grafana. When you configure [x]PM graphs to show your metrics, Grafana’s editor will display your existing saved searches, and it will autocomplete as you type your queries to specify the metrics you want to focus on. In addition, you can customize the latency percentiles you want to see for your [x]PM time-series data with any value, so you can tailor your system performance monitoring to your business objectives or customer requirements.
When you notice an unexpected error or unusual fluctuation in your performance data within Grafana, you can drill down to specific example traces related to the anomalous behavior in [x]PM. You can then view detailed information from those specific traces, such as log payloads and bottlenecks in the underlying transactions, to quickly identify the root cause of the issue.
Many of our customers have already told us that this plugin will help them get even more value from [x]PM, because they can now see all of the performance data our product provides in the same context and alongside their other business-critical metrics.
Try it out and share your feedback with us at support@lightstep.com.
Originally published at lightstep.com on February 13, 2018.
