In my example, it will be "time-series-graph.yaml" after my custom dashboard above. Start with values that work, and adjust them if you later see false positives (red when system is fine) or false negatives (green when system has problems). With each added or newly monitored product/feature (here: payment methods), the whole dashboard size grows, so the page does not always look the same or fit on one screen. Second flow- Download the dashboard's JSON from Grafana and prepare the reverse transformation- "Templatization". Training for incidents anyway mostly happens through practice. The Grafonnet library is the official way to develop dashboards using the Jsonnet language. I think things might change with Grafana 5 provisioning, especially because Jsonnet has a go implementation so we could imagine runtime compilation of the dashboards without jsonnet - directly by the grafana core. Product-unrelated dashboards, such as monitoring for Kubernetes clusters or infrastructure, can go into a separate category. GitHub - grafana/grafonnet-lib: Jsonnet library for generating Grafana Graphs with such a metric on the Y axis should therefore have Visualization > Axes > Y-Min set to 0 instead of auto in order to save screen space by not showing the negative area. (Please note:"These instructions are for Grafana 4 and earlier. To show the colors, you need to set thresholds on the Field tab. Cardinalitythe counter has these labels: payment_method (example values credit_card, voucher, bank_transfer), error_type (example values connectivity_through_internet, remote_service_down, local_configuration_error). Visualizations should be clearly distinguished with e.g. You may want to tweak this to your own use cases. How to upload dashboards as .json files to kubernetes via helm Be cautious with your use case, though. In regular scrape intervals, a metrics value gets collected by Prometheus. Auto-positioning True/False flag can be used in dashboards context metadata to tell the code the dashboard is a static one. Note: By registering, you agree to be emailed information about this event recording and related product-level information. In our example business, watching the health of partner or provider companies can make sense, since they may not have the most modern health monitoring in place. 3439. Dashboards as code, simplified A totally uninstrumented application can easily be monitored if you have access to its logs. Grafana as code: A complete guide to tools, tips, and tricks The easiest way is to duplicate one of the existing yaml files in that folder, rename it to the name of your dashboard and add the json to it. For very detailed dashboards, you may have a lot of graphs. While jsonnet is not the best or most well-known language, better alternatives such as CDK integration or other libraries may arise in the future. The colors could be adapted to show both low range and high range as red, with green for the expected, normal range. They are collapsible and ease navigation. Other improvements include a new approach to packaging observability resources, making it easy to install and upgrade dashboards and alerts as a single unit; and new tooling that allows you to store your dashboards in GitHub while enjoying the versatility of the Grafana UI, thus making Grafana, Prometheus, and other tools first-class citizens in your DevOps automation workflows. Workbooks / dashboards require the signed in user to have the relevant RBAC roles to the data they need, either through resource or workspace context, whereas a user only needs access to the Grafana dashboard. Meaningful dashboards also ease the path to setting correct alerts that do not wake you up unnecessarily. by that I can explore more. Minimal code for a dashboard. Grafana reads dashboards from a directory structure. For anybody ending up here. Ive been working hard on a solution to programmatically provision Grafana dashboards. As mentioned, I think a good solution survives without training, but instead has proper and concise documentation, and the code speaks for itself. So I dont assume knowledge of any specific language. There are several projects for managing dashboards in a friendly format for Grafana. Once thats done, you can treat them like any other code or configuration. We use kind to simulate a production Kubernetes cluster. Just like software, dashboards can become buggy and not show you the right things, for example if someone renames a metric! This dependency can be unattractive for non-Crossplane users. A Grafana dashboard contains panels and rows. Instead, a Stat visualization, combined with traffic light colors, gives you the answer in milliseconds: green is good, amber (yellow) is noteworthy, red is bad. The Grafonnet library and custom object properties are highly Grafana-specific. To manually apply it, open the test dashboard in your Grafana instance, then > JSON Model > copy-paste generated JSON > Save Changes. Save the dashboard with a meaningful name. Prometheus allows the time distinction with and/unless hour() >=6 <21. While this is typically discouraged, your software may really have so many important metrics. Deployment means that you have to make the JSON files available to Grafana in some directory. Each row has a QPS graph, which shows queries per second broken down by response code, and a latency graph, which shows the median and 99th percentile latency in milliseconds. You can get around this for a while using custom lint scripts that look at the JSON and tell you if you have got anything wrongthats what we did at first. Instead, the dashboard should show health across clusters. Coded dashboards improve quality and allow you to throw out old stuff easily and with the needed 4-eye principle. Metric names should be easy to find in code, so that developers can make sense of them fast in a stressful situation, or find out if/where a metric (still) exists. Connect Grafana to data sources, apps, and more, with Grafana Alerting, Grafana Incident, and Grafana OnCall, Frontend application observability web SDK, Try out and share prebuilt visualizations, Contribute to technical documentation provided by Grafana Labs, Help build the future of open source observability software A simple dashboard should be a matter of only few lines of code. This article showcases solutions for Grafana and Prometheus, but can also be applied generically for other platforms. Like for the logging rate of your systems, you might want to check for large metrics sporadically, or you may run into unnecessary cost and performance issues. Email update@grafana.com for help. Red and green may not be the best options, but I do not have the experience to give help here. Sign up for free now! For examples, Grafana Labs has acquired k6 which can be used for load tests, but in the future hopefully also to monitor TLS certificate expiry (until that feature exists, Blackbox exporter is a reasonable tool). In this flow developers perform these steps: 1) Make changes in Grafana UI. An example high-level dashboard of mine takes 115 kiB when Base64-encoded, so you also will not be able to say "we can fix this problem later", since you will reach the limit very soon. Ask me anything We all know about the great things Grafana dashboards can do, and configuring them as code makes it possible to get even more out of them.. Select a healthy time range for your system, and it should be green (note that the right-most time point is displayed, as we chose Calculation > Last). The respective alerts need to be designed in a similar way. Metadata in a row context can give you more granular control in the specific block of panels. Your browser will save a JSON file that you can then move into your Git repository. Are people interested in trying to work in that direction? When we want to understand our system, our Grafana dashboards are the first things we look at. Dashboard as code Grafana Issue #31038 A Grafana dashboard provides a way of displaying metrics and log data in the form of visualisations and reporting dashboards. Compared to the above option, this ensures that the visualization remains at the same size and does not jump around on the web page, and you know that the dashboard is still working. and then Save to file. You also need to know which thresholds are bad, or configure horizontal lines on the graph which represent warning and errors thresholds. "errors per 2 minutes") may work for the start. They will use the Min/Max settings. The next section explains a better way. Then Grafana could stay sane while rendering the dashboard. Other concerns are often just opinionated, and you will simply need to take the decision "do we allow it to become a mess or not". Here, I describe the official devenv that Grafana developers and contributors use (see Grafanas devenv README): Now open http://localhost:3001/ and log in with user admin and password admin. Now your Grafana configuration is managed entirely from a source control repository, which means you can do code review, CI, CD, and rollbacks. Show only problematic itemsfor instance, only yellow and worse. Grafana Dashboards-as-Code For Newcomers templating jeremyeder February 8, 2018, 1:29pm 1 Hi - we're trying to formalize our usage of Grafana, and one of the initial hurdles we see is how to allow dashboards to be easily edited by non-Grafana experts, and managed in source control. Make sure you overwrite during deployment instead of only adding new files/dashboards, since deletion and cleanup of technical debt is just as important as it is for writing software. Everything above 66% will be red. Possible solutions: Separate Grafana instance per environment. Or it may be multiple technical departments (operations + engineering). You only need this if you want to follow along with the blog article recommendations, play around with random sample data, and do not have a live Grafana instance with real application metrics at hand. We need jsonnet libraries for the outputs we want to generate. Had I known of grafana-dash-gen, I probably wouldnt have written grafanalib. Dashboards as Code with Grafana - weave.works Typically however, such as for error rate metrics, you want the top values shown first, since the bottom of the tooltip may be cut off in case of many entries. A graph (nowadays called Time series visualization) for our example metric, showing payment method and error type combinations, looks like this: Cool graph, right? Store the following content in grafana-values.yaml: Now open http://127.0.0.1:7878/ and log in with admin:admin. Adding our custom dashboard Now we can add our own custom configmap Helm template to the dashboards folder. Instead of a histogram, laying out the information as percentiles on a Stat visualization may give a faster overview and is preferable on high-level dashboards. The same applies to Stat visualizationsunless you choose Instant to only choose the end time point, but that can falsify the desired data to show. The high-level dashboard links to those. 5. Note: By signing up, you agree to be emailed related product-level information. But for dynamically generated entities you have to handle their positioning- x, y, h, w. addPanels is a function of the grafana.dashboard object, which will allow us to add an array of panels to be shown on the dashboard. if you would like grafana to publish your dashboard you need this step. There is probably some space there for convergence or reuse of the tools you mention. It must at least have: See the Grafana documentation to learn more. Select an incident time window, and choose a Max value to make it red. (!) In such case, group them into rows. This can also be interesting if you have a dev/prod split for your Grafana instances. The Y axis will only be sorted numerically once you change the query legend to {{le}}. Grafana is a web-based visualization tool for observability, and also part of a whole stack of related technologies, all based on open source. If any changes are made directly in the UI, the changes will be discarded when the provider resyncs. It is also in an alpha stage, so it has not reached a stable state yet. Prometheus recording rules/alerts in Grafana Cloud. It looks that this feature The grid has a negative gravity that moves panels up if there is empty space above a panel might be causing all these issues. Using grafanalib, you can build consistent, powerful dashboards that can easily extend to new services. Observing only the main business metric(s) is not sufficient. This must be visible in visualizations and alert messages. Anyone have a favorite flow for API dashboard deploy? The more interesting metrics for queues however are error rate and per-item processing time. Metrics- formulas, digits, units and ranges. Contribute to cap5bv/saltstack-grafana-tech-post development by creating an account on GitHub. If you do not need grafana to publish your dashboard, you can skip this step. Grafana Operator is a Kubernetes operator to provision and manage Grafana and its resources using Kubernetes Custom Resources. For users currently looking to manage the entire Grafana ecosystem of resources on either Grafana Cloud or OSS deployments of Grafana, its best to use the Grafana Terraform provider because it also supports the most Grafana resources compared to Grafanas other as code solutions. The repeat feature (Panel > Repeat options) makes Grafana create and align them automatically. This requires no more than one-page documentation/guide and an introduction by leadership or engineering managers. ), All payment methods failingbad code change affecting all those applications was introduced, networking issues, infrastructure down, other catastrophic scenario. [grafana.singlestat.new(Similar to the grafana.dashboard, we . Sorry, this event is only open to select companies. Think of your company: who is the main audience of the dashboards? Simple improvements should become one-line changes. Show health at a glance, with a simple indicator that the human eyes can quickly consume (e.g. We keep this shortcoming out of scope to keep the blog article simple. Grafana is hosted in a different domain, so to avoid CORS issue, I have to use proxy. Those other concepts are out of scope in this article. With awesome UI it makes tasks a lot easier. Grizzly is a command line tool that allows you to manage your observability resources with code. This give to tight coupling between systems. Do not use filler words like "monitoring" or "dashboard"of course it is a dashboard the screenshot only does this for the temporary "its a test" hint in the title. Thanks, A sample Terraform configuration for creating a dashboard looks like this: resource "grafana_dashboard" "metrics" { config_json = jsonencode ( { title = "as-code dashboard" uid = "ascode" }) } To get started, see the quickstart guides for the Grafana Terraform provider or check out the provider's documentation. As I do not have a Grafana Cloud account right now, I cannot tell if the cloud offering provides this much flexibility, or any good way of using the GitOps modelif they do, the documentation misses this important piece (as of 2022-04). credit card, voucher, bank transfer) having a separate microservice implementation. What are the specific ways in which grafanalib doesnt meet your needs? Use grafana.graphPanel.new().addLinks() to create panel links: For links to detailed dashboards, consistently pre-select a reasonable time frame such as now-30m. For our example of an error metric, you want to know if it goes above a threshold, and sum(rate()) does not strictly require distinction by cluster in the high-level visualizations. The [2m] in there should be selected depending on how stable the metric is and how fast you need to react once the metric reaches a threshold (mind the averaging!). Unit testing- structure validations, data correctness. Old and unused stuff is easy to detect and delete. Grafana Labs uses cookies for the normal operation of this website. Grafana dashboards as ConfigMaps. This means using a real programming language, as I dont think you could get this with YAML or an ordinary template system (I might be wrong though). Grafana as a code. CI/CD concepts and solution design. For example, an API serving requests for customers. TL/DR jump here) The heart of my solution: Replacements. Decreasing). Grafanalib is an open-source Python library in which we code dashboards. Wasssssuuup! Not a big deal if Min/Max cover the expected range. Most non-technical people rather know the suffix "UTC", so that one is preferable. For some of these, you may be able to leverage variables (mind Avoid dropdowns for variable values), while some value ranges may simply be too largefor instance if you have a million customersand you should rather show the top N problematic ones (Show only offenders or top N problematic items). As with Terraform, dashboard building is not the simplest process. client makes a request to proxy for Grafana dashboard, then Proxy will add JWT token to request header and send the request to Grafana. grafanalib has been far more popular than I could have anticipated. If you want human descriptions instead of numbers, you can also use the override feature (Field > Value mappings, or for specific fields: Overrides > [create an override] > Add override property > Value Mappings / No value), for instance to replace 0 with the text "no errors". Open positions, Check out the open source projects we support There are lots of other use cases where monitoring, alerting and tracing may help, such as performance issues, SLOs, business statistics and intelligence. Accessibility / color blindness support. Advantages of not creating dashboards visually through the Grafana UI: You get a developer workflow. First, they'll show a new dashboard schema for Grafana dashboards that removes the reverse engineering that had been previously required. A sample Kubernetes-style Grizzly configuration for creating a dashboard looks like this: Grizzly is best suited for users who are either using Jsonnet to manage Grafana resources or prefer a Kubernetes-style YAML definition of their Grafana resources. Heres what our dashboard definition for Scope looks like now: This is a Python module in a file called scope-services.dashboard.py that defines a single special dashboard variable and is evaluated by the gen-dashboard script in grafanalib to produce a JSON Grafana dashboard. Avoid high-cardinality metrics (many label combinations), since those take up lots of space, and queries take longer. Note: By signing up, you agree to be emailed related product-level information. In this post, we will deep dive into Grafana dashboards. If you have inconsistent names, it will take extra effort to repeat each dashboard visualization for each of the conventions, instead of just using labels to distinguish and plot the services (or other traits that you define as label dimensions, such as customers). In rare cases, you want a repetitive variable such as datacenter = cluster="dc"\,host=~"server. In our example though, the different payment methods and error types have very different thresholds: for instance, lets say the credit_card payment method has remote_service_down errors very frequently because the 3rd party provider is unreliable and we cannot help it, so we want to set a higher threshold because it otherwise unnecessarily shows a problem. Providing developers an infrastructure to control visualisation changes- both in code and manually in the comfortable UI. With jsonnet, use grafana.graphPanel.new(sort="decreasing") (not documented as of 2022-04). If grafanalib didnt have the momentum that it does, I would seriously look into switching. Gardening Week Dashboard 10. We do not want to have separate metrics credit_card_payment_errors_total and bank_transfer_payment_errors_total! You can add to that list managing your grafana dashboards from SaltStack : grafana dashboards state modules (you can also manage datasources, organisations and users) The nice thing is you can generate stuff by introspecting your infrastructure and systems with saltstack. Wasssssuuup! The Prometheus naming practices page gives very good guidance, such as to use lower_snake_case, name counters xxx_total or specify the unit such as xxx_seconds. A Dashboard can have templates added to it. I dont know how feasible any of this is, though.
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