Being in a field of The software industry myself, I know how hard it is to analyze, organize predict
scenarios based on mountains of information. It’s always easy to monitor data
when you have a relatively small pool to work with. However, big-fish companies
have to through a hundred thousand terabytes of data every day.
What is Grafana?
Grafana helps you
monitor all that information, presenting you with metrics and predictions over
a period of time. Metrics that can help you manage your business more
efficiently and improve on its structure. Its an open-source platform for data
visualization and offers a lot in terms of interactivity and features.
Grafana allows you to
create dashboards containing various panels, where each panel represents a
specific metric. The great thing about dashboards is versatility. You can
tailor to any project and their requirements.
Grafana works well
with a variety of data sources such as Elasticsearch, Prometheus, InfluxDB,
MySQL and many more and Grafana offers a customized query editor for each one
of them. it can be broken down into three components:
· The Panel is the base visualization
block in the tracking metrics. You must have seen the fancy graphs, heat maps
and other sorts of visual representation of data. Those are known as panels and
Grafana has a wide variety to choose from. Singlestat, free text, tables,
graphs, you name it and it’s there.
Grafana
also allows for seamless integration with many community-based plugins such as
clocks and maps. You can drag and rearrange them, resize them and even alter the
format and style on them as well.
·
The next item on the list is the
dashboard. It is a collection of one or more panels along with a set of
variables. For instance, let’s assume your monitoring several applications
across several servers. You can change the variables at any time to look at a
particular application or server of your choice. You can also customize your
dashboards and if you have trouble setting up your own, the community has your
back.
Since
Grafana is open-source, there are a lot of premade dashboards floating on
the internet. You can pick one up and work on it until you get the hang of it
and build your own once you have mastered the controls.
·
Annotations
Annotations
are like bookmarks only instead of marking pages, you get to mark a specific
spot on the graph. Hovering over the said annotation gives you various details
about the instance such as the description, tags, errors, uptime, downtime the
list goes on.
Annotations
are a great way to mark specific events and the consequences in the application
that occurred in response to said event.
What can you do with Grafana?
Text logs and error
notifications are a thing of the past. The future is a lot more controlled and
detaillistic. Suppose you’re developing a web app. You can then keep track of:
·
The app version after consecutive
updates and know exactly what was wrong with previous versions
·
Unique IDs and their respective IP
addresses from where they were sent.
·
Error codes.
·
Response time.
·
User
info such as emails, usernames.
·
The device running the application
Grafana is a
versatile platform that makes your duty of monitoring the development of your
app a lot more easier. It’s the one solution for all your problems and given
its efficiency you might as well give it a try.
