6 ms·

Grafana v6.2

176 points by el_duderino 7y ago

tbarbugli 7y ago
Lazy loading is a feature I was waiting for long time, hopefully this time is here to stay!
- retzkek 7y ago
  If your dashboards have so many panels that lazy loading is important, you need to reconsider your dashboard design. Endlessly scrolling to find the panel you're interested in makes for a painful user experience, and it makes it harder to compare series across panels. I aim to keep dashboards no larger than what can be displayed in a single window on a desktop, with perhaps some supplementary plots below, often in a collapsed row. I make heavy use of "drill-down" links, preferably from tables or single-stats (or more often the "status panel" for denser displays [1]), or in panel notes otherwise, to dive further into the data. When designing a dashboard, I ask myself "what story is this dashboard going to tell?", and as with a good novel I try to keep from straying too far from that narrative, branching side-plots out into new dashboards as needed. [1] https://grafana.com/plugins/vonage-status-panel https://grafana.com/plugins/vonage-status-panel
  - mtrpcic 7y ago
    It depends on what your use case for the dashboard is. If the dashboard is meant for constant display, then yes, too many panels is a bad user experience. On the other hand, if you're trying to create a "Oh my god something is wrong in production right now, show me everything so I can see at a glance" dashboard, I would rather scroll than jump between 3 tabs because of "aesthetics".
    - retzkek 7y ago
      Aesthetics? How about ergonomics? In the same vein as "alert fatigue," having too many panels on a dashboard (or too many lines on a graph, etc) can overload the user, and obscure the real issues. > show me everything so I can see at a glance Yes, exactly, at a glance, not after scrolling through five pages. With careful dashboard design, you should be able to see a problem area actually "at a glance," and then drill-down to pinpoint the actual cause, faster than you'll find it scrolling through a single large dashboard. I admit this is something of an ideal to aim for, and it can take a lot of time and effort to achieve, which may not be available. However, it will pay off in the "Oh my god something is wrong in production right now" scenario if you can take that time.
      - zepolen 7y ago
        Agree, designing a good dashboard is a skill just like anything else it comes with experience.
    - zepolen 7y ago
      It's not about aesthetics it's about identification of problems in O(log n) instead of O(n) time. Scrolling through 100 graphs is slower than scanning 10 main graphs and 10 subgraphs per.
- mkching 7y ago
  Same here, we just deployed a test instance running the upgraded code. No issues in our existing dashboards so far, and our initial testers are liking the speed improvements a lot.
NickBusey 7y ago
Those new gradient bar gauges look great, can't wait to use them on some environmental data.
dogtail 7y ago
Waiting for better Loki integration.
- netingle 7y ago
  Loki author here: got some ideas? We’re all ears!
  - mgbmtl 7y ago
    Hi! Any plans to release binaries? If I am currently using 1% of ELK features (I use it for simple log aggregation of servers), but not k8s, would you still recommend loki?
    - netingle 7y ago
      Yes we do! Plan on cutting v0.1 in the next week or so, kubecon kinda got in the way... I’ll work on adding some binaries to that - what platform you looking for?
      - nickserv 7y ago
        Not the OP but in the same situation. I run Debian 9 on my servers, would be great to have some debs to try it out. Thanks!
      - mgbmtl 7y ago
        Great, thank you! I look forward to testing it. I also use Debian 9 (or stable, slowly moving towards Debian 10 which will soon be released).
      - Hansi 7y ago
        +1 RedHat 7 and 8.
  - olafure 7y ago
    Alerting on certain log entries, please :) Even a simple label match would be a good start.
mikepurvis 7y ago
Tried Grafana briefly a year or two ago, and I wanted to like it, but similar to Kibana, it's laser-focused on the task of realtime monitoring current data. I wanted to use it for a high-level view of historical stuff (robot data recordings from ROS), and there was a lot of really basic functionality for that use case that just wasn't there at all. Even stuff as basic as being able to pan a plot back and forth after you've zoomed in— here's the four year old ticket for that in their issue tracker: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1387 https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1387 I ended up generating Bokeh plots and had a much better time. So Grafana is great for what it's great at, but I don't recommend it for uses other than current-moment data.
- lykr0n 7y ago
  Sounds like you want to look at Redash or other like BI platforms.
- dTal 7y ago
  It's solely focused on data analysis (none of this "dashboard" stuff), but I've found Kst[0] to be the lowest-friction way of going from plaintext time-series data to fancy, zoomable, draggable plots in whatever layout you want. It handles realtime data very handily as well, happily scaling with as much backlog as I could throw at it. Bokeh is a nice kit as far as it goes, but I hit scaling problems quite early with it - as I understood it, it was supposed to send incremental updates to the client, but in fact it resent everything every time - and therefore fell over after half an hour when the time to update exceeded the update rate. Maybe I was holding it wrong. [0] https://kst-plot.kde.org/ https://kst-plot.kde.org/
  - snowwindwaves 7y ago
    kst is amazing! I write CSV files with 100 series about 10 samples per second for 8-12 hours a day and it doesn't break a sweat plotting the whole day, any number of series, it does transformations as required, and the next day when I have a new CSV file I can point it at the new file and keep all the plots I configured the previous day. KST has been a total game changer for me commissioning plants and machines.
colechristensen 7y ago
I have been having some fun recently with Grafana session storage. In the end it seemed like a database issue which was unavoidable because there aren't other options for session storage when you use a db (other than downgrading to 5.x) After endless grinding with configuration options, debugging go code (new skill) and javascript running in the browser I tried switching out to a local mariadb and it worked instantly. Lesson learned, be wary of a Galera mysql cluster. My running but unproved theory that during the login process the creation of the user token in the db and reading it back happen so quickly that the item isn't available yet so Grafana can't find it and logs the user out.
Sytten 7y ago
Great job. Though I am still waiting for official CSP support, it seems like it should already be there. Unfortunately the legacy angular code prevents us from applying any real policy.
BossingAround 7y ago
If I have a CSV of a number of values (say in the thousands), and what I need is basically a tool that will create a slick, good-looking graph that compares two or more of these CSVs, what's the best tool for that? Think JMeter if that rings any bells. I honestly just used some basic graph-generation tools which would spit out PNGs, which is always less than satisfying. I looked at Grafana, but never had the time to actually try it out. My feeling also was that it was a bit different of a use-case as I had no real-time data, but I may be totally wrong here.
- wielebny 7y ago
  We have JMeter to pump the data to InfluxDB and then visualise them in Grafana. Additionaly, you can see results while JMeter is still running.
markbnj 7y ago
A fun little thing to do if you want to play around with the new release: install prometheus, prometheus node_exporter, grafana, and grab the node_exporter full dashboard from the grafana site. In like 10 minutes you've got a pretty cool system info dashboard for your laptop :).
- latchkey 7y ago
  I did this for 1500 raspberry pi-class litecoin miners. It was awesome to be able to see all the data in realtime across so many devices.

Grafana v6.2

176 points by el_duderino 7y ago

tbarbugli 7y ago

Lazy loading is a feature I was waiting for long time, hopefully this time is here to stay!

retzkek 7y ago
If your dashboards have so many panels that lazy loading is important, you need to reconsider your dashboard design. Endlessly scrolling to find the panel you're interested in makes for a painful user experience, and it makes it harder to compare series across panels. I aim to keep dashboards no larger than what can be displayed in a single window on a desktop, with perhaps some supplementary plots below, often in a collapsed row. I make heavy use of "drill-down" links, preferably from tables or single-stats (or more often the "status panel" for denser displays [1]), or in panel notes otherwise, to dive further into the data. When designing a dashboard, I ask myself "what story is this dashboard going to tell?", and as with a good novel I try to keep from straying too far from that narrative, branching side-plots out into new dashboards as needed. [1] https://grafana.com/plugins/vonage-status-panel https://grafana.com/plugins/vonage-status-panel
- mtrpcic 7y ago
  It depends on what your use case for the dashboard is. If the dashboard is meant for constant display, then yes, too many panels is a bad user experience. On the other hand, if you're trying to create a "Oh my god something is wrong in production right now, show me everything so I can see at a glance" dashboard, I would rather scroll than jump between 3 tabs because of "aesthetics".
  - retzkek 7y ago
    Aesthetics? How about ergonomics? In the same vein as "alert fatigue," having too many panels on a dashboard (or too many lines on a graph, etc) can overload the user, and obscure the real issues. > show me everything so I can see at a glance Yes, exactly, at a glance, not after scrolling through five pages. With careful dashboard design, you should be able to see a problem area actually "at a glance," and then drill-down to pinpoint the actual cause, faster than you'll find it scrolling through a single large dashboard. I admit this is something of an ideal to aim for, and it can take a lot of time and effort to achieve, which may not be available. However, it will pay off in the "Oh my god something is wrong in production right now" scenario if you can take that time.
    - zepolen 7y ago
      Agree, designing a good dashboard is a skill just like anything else it comes with experience.
  - zepolen 7y ago
    It's not about aesthetics it's about identification of problems in O(log n) instead of O(n) time. Scrolling through 100 graphs is slower than scanning 10 main graphs and 10 subgraphs per.
mkching 7y ago
Same here, we just deployed a test instance running the upgraded code. No issues in our existing dashboards so far, and our initial testers are liking the speed improvements a lot.

NickBusey 7y ago

Those new gradient bar gauges look great, can't wait to use them on some environmental data.

dogtail 7y ago

Waiting for better Loki integration.

netingle 7y ago
Loki author here: got some ideas? We’re all ears!
- mgbmtl 7y ago
  Hi! Any plans to release binaries? If I am currently using 1% of ELK features (I use it for simple log aggregation of servers), but not k8s, would you still recommend loki?
  - netingle 7y ago
    Yes we do! Plan on cutting v0.1 in the next week or so, kubecon kinda got in the way... I’ll work on adding some binaries to that - what platform you looking for?
    - nickserv 7y ago
      Not the OP but in the same situation. I run Debian 9 on my servers, would be great to have some debs to try it out. Thanks!
    - mgbmtl 7y ago
      Great, thank you! I look forward to testing it. I also use Debian 9 (or stable, slowly moving towards Debian 10 which will soon be released).
    - Hansi 7y ago
      +1 RedHat 7 and 8.
- olafure 7y ago
  Alerting on certain log entries, please :) Even a simple label match would be a good start.

mikepurvis 7y ago

Tried Grafana briefly a year or two ago, and I wanted to like it, but similar to Kibana, it's laser-focused on the task of realtime monitoring current data. I wanted to use it for a high-level view of historical stuff (robot data recordings from ROS), and there was a lot of really basic functionality for that use case that just wasn't there at all. Even stuff as basic as being able to pan a plot back and forth after you've zoomed in— here's the four year old ticket for that in their issue tracker: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1387 https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1387 I ended up generating Bokeh plots and had a much better time. So Grafana is great for what it's great at, but I don't recommend it for uses other than current-moment data.

lykr0n 7y ago
Sounds like you want to look at Redash or other like BI platforms.
dTal 7y ago
It's solely focused on data analysis (none of this "dashboard" stuff), but I've found Kst[0] to be the lowest-friction way of going from plaintext time-series data to fancy, zoomable, draggable plots in whatever layout you want. It handles realtime data very handily as well, happily scaling with as much backlog as I could throw at it. Bokeh is a nice kit as far as it goes, but I hit scaling problems quite early with it - as I understood it, it was supposed to send incremental updates to the client, but in fact it resent everything every time - and therefore fell over after half an hour when the time to update exceeded the update rate. Maybe I was holding it wrong. [0] https://kst-plot.kde.org/ https://kst-plot.kde.org/
- snowwindwaves 7y ago
  kst is amazing! I write CSV files with 100 series about 10 samples per second for 8-12 hours a day and it doesn't break a sweat plotting the whole day, any number of series, it does transformations as required, and the next day when I have a new CSV file I can point it at the new file and keep all the plots I configured the previous day. KST has been a total game changer for me commissioning plants and machines.

colechristensen 7y ago

I have been having some fun recently with Grafana session storage. In the end it seemed like a database issue which was unavoidable because there aren't other options for session storage when you use a db (other than downgrading to 5.x) After endless grinding with configuration options, debugging go code (new skill) and javascript running in the browser I tried switching out to a local mariadb and it worked instantly. Lesson learned, be wary of a Galera mysql cluster. My running but unproved theory that during the login process the creation of the user token in the db and reading it back happen so quickly that the item isn't available yet so Grafana can't find it and logs the user out.

Sytten 7y ago

Great job. Though I am still waiting for official CSP support, it seems like it should already be there. Unfortunately the legacy angular code prevents us from applying any real policy.

BossingAround 7y ago

If I have a CSV of a number of values (say in the thousands), and what I need is basically a tool that will create a slick, good-looking graph that compares two or more of these CSVs, what's the best tool for that? Think JMeter if that rings any bells. I honestly just used some basic graph-generation tools which would spit out PNGs, which is always less than satisfying. I looked at Grafana, but never had the time to actually try it out. My feeling also was that it was a bit different of a use-case as I had no real-time data, but I may be totally wrong here.

wielebny 7y ago
We have JMeter to pump the data to InfluxDB and then visualise them in Grafana. Additionaly, you can see results while JMeter is still running.

markbnj 7y ago

A fun little thing to do if you want to play around with the new release: install prometheus, prometheus node_exporter, grafana, and grab the node_exporter full dashboard from the grafana site. In like 10 minutes you've got a pretty cool system info dashboard for your laptop :).

latchkey 7y ago
I did this for 1500 raspberry pi-class litecoin miners. It was awesome to be able to see all the data in realtime across so many devices.