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Anyone using Grafana in production? I would like to hear some opinions and experiences. I found it a bit disappointing as in; at first impression it really loo

by sgt 9y ago

Anyone using Grafana in production? I would like to hear some opinions and experiences. I found it a bit disappointing as in; at first impression it really looks amazing, and the charts are stunning. However once you go into the knitty gritty and find lacking user/role/permissions management it was disappointing.

scrollaway 9y ago
Grafana is incredible and 4.6 fixes my two major issues with it (no cloudwatch alerting and no postgres support). It does take some training to get good at writing dashboards however. But it's free to try by either self-hosting it or with the personal plan on https://grafana.com https://grafana.com. Highly recommended either way.
pimeys 9y ago
I use Grafana for everything. At work a part of every feature I do is a Grafana graph to monitor when the feature goes to production. At home I graph my blood glucose having information such as A1c always available for me real time. Such a useful tool.
Gonzih 9y ago
Yes, we usa grafana in our team, but only isolated on internal network and with access only to 12 team members, so no real need for roles etc. We use zabbix, elasticsearch and graphite data sources. Works like a charm in our case, also embedded graphs are not ideal, but useful for internal dashboards and etc. So very positive experience so far. Before grafana integration we had kibana + graphite + zabbix as a 3 separate things.
maaaats 9y ago
Why would permissions matter so much? We use it, good experiences so far.
- sgt 9y ago
  Giving different teams and outside partners (i.e. less trusted) access to a variety of dashboards, not just due to security but also to make it less confusing to these users.
Thaxll 9y ago
Grafana supports LDAP out of the box.
chrissnell 9y ago
Did they ever make it suitable for exposing to the public Internet? I've been wanting to embed Grafana charts in a public page [1] for a while now because they're just so much better than the other charting options out there. [1] https://mhkweather.com https://mhkweather.com
- arianvanp 9y ago
  AFAIK, you can expose read only versions of graphs for embedding into pages these days
- niklasrde 9y ago
  As arianvanp has pointed out, you can indeed create public read-only snapshots to share. You can either create local link to a read-only version of what you're looking at right now. Whoever wants to access it, must be able to access the grafana host. Alternatively, you can upload the snapshot to the raintank site. I have just exported a snapshot of a panel on one of our dashboards, with only one of the panels' data, see https://snapshot.raintank.io/dashboard/snapshot/II7NYMU3v9vTpk9OFy2BB6BuCABDlc6m https://snapshot.raintank.io/dashboard/snapshot/II7NYMU3v9vT... for an example. You can zoom in, but not further out. You can also generate an iframe embed code (for a single panel), but if you want to share that in real-time publicly, you'd need to expose grafana to the public internet. You can embed from a shared snapshot at raintank, as well. See the one above, if you click the title, you can 'Share' that and then embed it.
bboreham 9y ago
I use it every day against a (multi-tenant) Prometheus back-end. You have to put in quite a lot of effort to design the right queries and charts, but after that it works great for my needs. We prefer to have dashboards under source control so generate them using grafanalib - see https://www.weave.works/blog/grafana-dashboards-as-code/ https://www.weave.works/blog/grafana-dashboards-as-code/ I think this approach shifts the need for roles and permissions as we never save dashboards from the UI.
ollybee 9y ago
I've found the opposite to be true, once you get into the knotty gritty there's so much that can be customized to different use cases. You can have different organisations and 4 levels of user roles. Lots of ways to handle authentication, a great API so everything is scriptable and lots more. It may not quite fit your needs but there's been a lot of effort put into the details. I'd been interested to know the specifics of what you couldn’t achieve with it?
tokenizerrr 9y ago
Also, from what I've gathered the frontend can execute whatever query it wants on the backend without any kind of checks.

by sgt 9y ago

scrollaway 9y ago

Grafana is incredible and 4.6 fixes my two major issues with it (no cloudwatch alerting and no postgres support). It does take some training to get good at writing dashboards however. But it's free to try by either self-hosting it or with the personal plan on https://grafana.com https://grafana.com. Highly recommended either way.

pimeys 9y ago

I use Grafana for everything. At work a part of every feature I do is a Grafana graph to monitor when the feature goes to production. At home I graph my blood glucose having information such as A1c always available for me real time. Such a useful tool.

Gonzih 9y ago

Yes, we usa grafana in our team, but only isolated on internal network and with access only to 12 team members, so no real need for roles etc. We use zabbix, elasticsearch and graphite data sources. Works like a charm in our case, also embedded graphs are not ideal, but useful for internal dashboards and etc. So very positive experience so far. Before grafana integration we had kibana + graphite + zabbix as a 3 separate things.

maaaats 9y ago

Why would permissions matter so much? We use it, good experiences so far.

sgt 9y ago
Giving different teams and outside partners (i.e. less trusted) access to a variety of dashboards, not just due to security but also to make it less confusing to these users.

Thaxll 9y ago

Grafana supports LDAP out of the box.

chrissnell 9y ago

Did they ever make it suitable for exposing to the public Internet? I've been wanting to embed Grafana charts in a public page [1] for a while now because they're just so much better than the other charting options out there. [1] https://mhkweather.com https://mhkweather.com

arianvanp 9y ago
AFAIK, you can expose read only versions of graphs for embedding into pages these days
niklasrde 9y ago
As arianvanp has pointed out, you can indeed create public read-only snapshots to share. You can either create local link to a read-only version of what you're looking at right now. Whoever wants to access it, must be able to access the grafana host. Alternatively, you can upload the snapshot to the raintank site. I have just exported a snapshot of a panel on one of our dashboards, with only one of the panels' data, see https://snapshot.raintank.io/dashboard/snapshot/II7NYMU3v9vTpk9OFy2BB6BuCABDlc6m https://snapshot.raintank.io/dashboard/snapshot/II7NYMU3v9vT... for an example. You can zoom in, but not further out. You can also generate an iframe embed code (for a single panel), but if you want to share that in real-time publicly, you'd need to expose grafana to the public internet. You can embed from a shared snapshot at raintank, as well. See the one above, if you click the title, you can 'Share' that and then embed it.

bboreham 9y ago

I use it every day against a (multi-tenant) Prometheus back-end. You have to put in quite a lot of effort to design the right queries and charts, but after that it works great for my needs. We prefer to have dashboards under source control so generate them using grafanalib - see https://www.weave.works/blog/grafana-dashboards-as-code/ https://www.weave.works/blog/grafana-dashboards-as-code/ I think this approach shifts the need for roles and permissions as we never save dashboards from the UI.

ollybee 9y ago

I've found the opposite to be true, once you get into the knotty gritty there's so much that can be customized to different use cases. You can have different organisations and 4 levels of user roles. Lots of ways to handle authentication, a great API so everything is scriptable and lots more. It may not quite fit your needs but there's been a lot of effort put into the details. I'd been interested to know the specifics of what you couldn’t achieve with it?

tokenizerrr 9y ago

Also, from what I've gathered the frontend can execute whatever query it wants on the backend without any kind of checks.