Grafana and graphite are what makes managing large infrastructure manageable.<p>I was introduced to grafana in early 2014. I was a bit sceptical as I was using graphitus to make dashboards. However I soon converted.<p>I maintained a very large graphite cluster at the Financial Times (I think it was about 1 million active metrics, but it might have be 0.5 mill, I forget) The only sane way to manage the front end was using grafana. Simple oauth2 integration meant that I could avoid the nightmare of trying to get AD access, and it also mean't one click SSO.<p>Grafana was one of those tools that was self evidently the best in class, so it was widely adopted. Within two years, virtually every team screen had grafana on it. Non programmers used it, and even set alerts. How many other "devop" tool can boast that level of universality?<p>Either way, keep up the good work, and best of luck.
I have had some good success using Grafana to visualize live data from a fleet of robots - I started out with graphite as the data store but quickly moved to InfluxDB which had better performance. Overall it was a very impressive tool which required little set up and configuration!
Grafana seems amazing at first.<p>Variables to abstract out some, a bit of "repeat" to loop over something, and you get pretty drop-downs that you can combine to show nice graphs.<p>Then you think "I'll add it to a playlist". and you do so.<p>Then you think "my kiosk can't scroll this much for all, let's have one screen each for the apps" and you do.<p>And then you realize you cannot use variables from playlists, and you cannot template screens.<p>So you make eight copies of your screen, one for each variable configuration.<p>And you edit each copy of your screen to set the variables, and save it.<p>And then you realize that there was a typo in one panel.<p>So you go in and edit in eight different screens to fix that typo.<p>Then you realize that it doesn't look good on the TN panel, so you need to change a few colours to get better contrast.<p>So you do that on eight different copies, by the means of clicking in every pane, navigating through the point-n-click and then pressing.<p>But you realized that you learned this, so you're fast, and use the keyboard. Except then the change doesn't take.<p>Because grafana requires you to click in another field after you've edited, or your change doesn't hold if you press "Escape" or other key to navigate back.<p>And that's how I learned how Grafana is best of breed in GUI dashboard tools. Sort of how a pug is best of breed in a dog competition.
Our partners are very happy Grafana users. But I've observed some pain when they construct dashboards and alerts for each new device added. They are going to add thousands so this is very labour intensive! Some kind of "smart clone" would be very useful. (Thousands of dashboards feels like an anti-pattern, but alerts attached to thousands of sources is not)
Love the idea to see more integration with traces, I did integrate traces of jaeger within a diagram view inside grafana few months ago: <a href="https://github.com/alexvaut/OpenTracingDiagram" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/alexvaut/OpenTracingDiagram</a>. I'm wondering what are the plans in this area with OpenTelemetry ? I found that <a href="https://grafana.com/blog/2019/10/21/whats-next-for-observability/" rel="nofollow">https://grafana.com/blog/2019/10/21/whats-next-for-observabi...</a> but it doesn't tell me much...
Sounds promising. Have found Grafana really good, flexible and usable with many available data sources and display options.
Hope it continues to move forward and make it easier to get it adopted within my organisation.
I love Grafana and had no idea it was working on logs and tracing, only metrics!<p>"That goes hand-in-hand with pushing forward with our vision of building an open, composable observability platform that brings together the three pillars of observability – logs, metrics, and traces – in a single experience, with Grafana at the center."
I've recently managed to make Prometheus+Grafana stateless using <a href="https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cortexproject/cortex</a> if anyone is having issues with scaling / backing up.
What I'd really like to see is a more generic approach to data visualization done with the same care and expertise as is displayed with the time series visualization currently. Perhaps this would be a different product under the same brand, but I believe that the data viz space has a lot of room for competition - tableaux and power bi, etc... are leaving a lot of room for competition. I'm currently looking closely at redash because of this, would love it if I could solve the same problems with grafana.<p>*note: I know that to some degree this is possible with current grafana, but if you read through the issues folks have with doing data viz outside of time series, you'll catch my meaning.
I tried it 2 years ago. It was easy to get started, but not quite straightforward to extend it and use custom panels.<p>Also, it didn't support image uploads, you'd need to host them somewhere else if you wanted them to show up in a panel. rather inconvenient.
This is what Open Source Companies need to look like. Honestly the more they do stuff like this, the more this makes graphite's hosted options the only game in town I trust.
There is a big market IMO for companies that want to offer a managed grafana to their users. Just take a look at the latest offering from Logz or hosted-graphite. We also do it where I work. It is really not easy, but I hope it will get better. I would happily pay to get support from them and features that facilitate my life.
We recently converted an internal dashboard for the Helium blockchain to a public tool and the reception/usefulness has been awesome. (For anyone interested -> <a href="http://dashboard.helium.com" rel="nofollow">http://dashboard.helium.com</a>)<p>Congrats to the team. Well-deserved.
Is there a docker-compatible logging client that pipes to hosted grafana ?<p>I've been wondering about why there are not more elastic based or grafana based hosted solutions.