Learn Grafana 7.0: A beginner's guide to getting well versed in analytics, interactive dashboards, and monitoring

Learn Grafana 7.0

A beginner's guide to getting well versed in analytics, interactive dashboards, and monitoring

Eric Salituro

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Packt.com

Subscribe to our online digital library for full access to over 7,000 books and videos, as well as industry leading tools to help you plan your personal development and advance your career. For more information, please visit our website.

Why subscribe?

Spend less time learning and more time coding with practical eBooks and Videos from over 4,000 industry professionals

Improve your learning with Skill Plans built especially for you

Get a free eBook or video every month

Fully searchable for easy access to vital information

Copy and paste, print, and bookmark content

Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.packt.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at [email protected] for more details.

At www.packt.com, you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters, and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks.

Learn Grafana 7.0

Copyright © 2020 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

Commissioning Editor: Mrinmayee Kawalkar

Acquisition Editor:Devika Battike

Content Development Editor:Sean Lobo

Senior Editor: David Sugarman

Technical Editor:Utkarsha S. Kadam

Copy Editor:Safis Editing

Project Coordinator:Aishwarya Mohan

Proofreader: Safis Editing

Indexer:Priyanka Dhadke

Production Designer:Joshua Misquitta

First published: June 2020

Production reference: 1240620

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

35 Livery Street

Birmingham

B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-83882-658-1

www.packt.com

About the author

Eric Salituro is currently a senior software engineer with the enterprise data and analytics platform team at Zendesk. He has an IT career that spans more than 30 years, over 20 of which were spent in the motion picture industry working as a pipeline technical director and software developer for innovative and creative studios such as DreamWorks, Digital Domain, and Pixar. Before moving to Zendesk, he worked at Pixar, helping to manage and maintain their production render farm as a senior software developer. Among his accomplishments is the development of a Python API toolkit for Grafana aimed at streamlining the creation of rendering metrics dashboards.

About the reviewers

Šimon Podlipský is a software development engineer with a master's degree in management and software quality management from the University of Economics in Prague. His passion is contributing to open source software, including Grafana. He also maintains and develops the Grafana JSON data source, which you can try out yourself after finishing the book.

Hugh O'Brien is a 15-year veteran of cloud infrastructure and performance monitoring. He is Head of Infrastructure at Thrive Global and has previously worked at Zendesk, Jet.com and Intel. His presentation at Kafka Summit 2018 ZFS: Better Living Through Filesystems (viewable online) is basically just a sequence of Grafana screenshots. He has, for no discernible reason, used Grafana/Prometheus to instrument his home router (Wi-Fi RSSI as radar), android phone (XYZ accelerometery for activity detection), and soon his car’s CAN bus (emissions, maybe?). He holds a degree in Computer Engineering from his hometown of Limerick, Ireland, and is the only living person who knows the origins of the 2.4GHz ISM band.

Packt is searching for authors like you

If you're interested in becoming an author for Packt, please visit authors.packtpub.com and apply today. We have worked with thousands of developers and tech professionals, just like you, to help them share their insight with the global tech community. You can make a general application, apply for a specific hot topic that we are recruiting an author for, or submit your own idea.

Table of Contents

Title Page

About Packt

Why subscribe?

Copyright and Credits

Learn Grafana 7.0

Contributors

About the author

About the reviewers

Packt is searching for authors like you

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

Download the example code files

Download the color images

Conventions used

Get in touch

Reviews

Getting Started with Grafana

Introduction to Data Visualization with Grafana

Technical requirements

Data and visualization

Storing, retrieving, and visualizing data

Why Grafana?

Installing Grafana

Grafana in a Docker container

Grafana for OS X

Homebrew

The command line

Grafana for Linux

RedHat Linux

Debian Linux

Grafana for Windows

Hosted Grafana on the cloud

Connecting to the Grafana server

Summary

A Tour of the Grafana Interface

Technical requirements

Exploring Grafana – the Home dashboard

Glancing at the sidebar menu

The dashboards button

The dashboard panels

The dashboard settings and view mode

Learning to use the icons on Grafana's left sidebar

The Grafana logo

Search

Create

Dashboard

Folder

Import

Dashboards

Manage

Playlists

Snapshots

Explore

Alerting

Alert Rules

Notification channels

Configuration

Data Sources

Users

Teams

Plugins

Preferences

API Keys

Server Admin

Users

Orgs

Settings

Stats

Summary

An Introduction to the Graph Panel

Technical requirements

Touring the graph panel

Creating a simple data source

Creating a graph panel

Generating data series in the Query tab

What is a query?

Query tab features

The Data source menu

Query Options

Query inspector

Query

Query controls

Add Query

Duplicating an existing query

Editing the graph in the Panel tab

The Settings section

Setting the panel title and description

The Visualisation section

The Display section

The Hover tooltip

Stacking and Null value

The Series overrides section

The Axes section

Left Y/Right Y

X-axis

The Legend section

Options

Values

Hide series

The Thresholds section

Setting a threshold

The Time Region section

Setting a time region

The Data links section

The Links section

The Repeat options section

Monitoring with the Alert tab

Rule

Conditions

No Data & Error Handling

Notifications

Summary

Real-World Grafana

Connecting Grafana to a Data Source

Technical requirements

Installing the Prometheus server

Installing Prometheus from Docker

Configuring the Prometheus data source

Exploring Prometheus

Using Explore for investigation

Configuring Grafana metrics

Querying the Prometheus data source

Typing in a metrics query

Querying for process metrics

Detecting trends with aggregations

Applying aggregations to our query data

Understanding the data source limitations

Querying limits for series aggregations

Querying limits for time aggregations

Summary

Visualizing Data in the Graph Panel

Technical requirements

Making advanced queries

Launching server Docker containers

Writing the ETL script

Running the script

Configuring the InfluxDB data source

Understanding the time series data display

Displaying time-aggregated data

Debugging queries with the Query Inspector

Observing time interval effects

Setting the minimum interval

Setting vertical axes

Setting axis units

Converting into Fahrenheit

Autoscaling the Y axis

Dual Y-axis display

Graphing relative humidity

Graphing wind chill

Working with legends

Setting legend contents

Enabling legend aggregations

Summary

Visualization Panels in Grafana

Technical requirements

Introducing the Stat panel

Loading the dataset

Creating a Stat panel

Setting the Panel tab's display

Setting the value aggregation

Setting Graph mode

Setting the Field tab's standard options

Setting units

Setting Min and Max

Setting the display name

Setting the Field tab thresholds

Setting the Field panel's value mappings

Building our Stat panels

Working with the Gauge panel

Setting the Panel tab's display

Setting the Field tab's standard options

Setting the Field tab thresholds

Adding a Bar Gauge panel

Setting the Gradient mode

Setting the Retro LCD mode

Setting the Basic mode

Building a bar gauge

Geolocating data on the Worldmap panel

Ingesting a new earthquake dataset

Updating process_cli()

Updating main()

Adding dump_eq_data()

Adding load_eq_data()

Configuring the InfluxDB data source

Setting up the Worldmap panel

Structuring data fields in the Table panel

Comparing aggregations

Overriding field settings

Summary

Creating Your First Dashboard

Technical requirements

Designing a dashboard

Conveying information

Determining the visual context

Prioritizing elements of importance

Creating a high information density dashboard

Designing the dashboard

Building a station text panel

Modifying the weather.py script

Building the current conditions panel

Building the temperature panel

Building the moisture panel

Building the barometer panels

Creating a barometric pressure graph panel

Creating a barometric pressure trend graph panel

Building the wind panels

Creating a wind speed graph panel

Creating a wind direction stat panel

Building the visibility panel

Creating a high information visibility dashboard

Designing the dashboard

Building the station panel

Building the temperature panels

Buiding a current temperature stat panel

Creating a high-temperature stat panel

Creating a low-temperature stat panel

Creating a dew point stat panel

Building the barometer panels

Creating a barometer reading stat panel

Creating a barometric pressure trend stat panel

Building the visibility panel

Building the wind panels

Creating a wind speed stat panel

Creating a wind gust stat panel

Creating a wind direction stat panel

Building a current conditions panel

Summary

Working with Advanced Dashboard Features

Technical requirements

Building the data server

Templating dashboards

Querying with Elasticsearch

Creating a template variable

Adding template variables to the graph panel

Templating additional variables

Creating Ad hoc filters

Repeating rows and panels with template variables

Creating a new dashboard

Setting up the template variables

Configuring the panels

Linking dashboards

Adding dashboard tags

Locking down a template variable

Creating dashboard links

Annotating dashboards

Annotating the graph panel

Querying tagged annotations

Creating Elasticsearch annotation queries

Sharing dashboards

Sharing dashboard links

Sharing dashboards by exporting

Sharing dashboard snapshots

Summary

Grafana Alerting

Technical requirements

Setting thresholds

Capturing real-time data

Processing the Logstash input

Filtering the Logstash events

Outputting the data

Creating an ElasticSearch data source

Building the dashboard panels

Setting thresholds

Constraining thresholds to time regions

Configuring alerts

Alert rules

Conditions

Handling edge cases

Assigning alerts to notification channels

Setting up an email notification channel

Configuring Grafana Docker containers

Troubleshooting and controlling alerts

Checking the alert history

Testing the rule

Controlling alerts

Summary

Exploring Logs with Grafana Loki

Loading system logs into Loki

Visualizing Loki log data with Explore

Adding additional service logs

Querying logs and metrics with Explore

Summary

Managing Grafana

Organizing Dashboards

Technical requirements

Managing dashboards and folders

Naming a dashboard

Dashboard naming tips

Working with dashboard folders

Creating a dashboard folder

Adding dashboards to a folder

Deleting folders

Guiding dashboard folder management

Starring and tagging dashboards

Marking dashboards as favorites

Tagging dashboards

Adding tags

Deleting tags

Building and running dashboard playlists

Creating a playlist

Displaying a playlist

Displaying playlists in normal mode

Displaying playlists in TV mode

Displaying playlists in Kiosk mode

Displaying playlists with auto fit panels

Editing a playlist

Exploring the dashboard list panel

Setting dashboard list panel options

Summary

Managing Permissions for Users and Teams

Technical requirements

Understanding key permissions concepts

Organizations

Users

Roles

Teams

Adding users

Adding users – by invitation only

Adding users – serve yourself

Setting permissions

Setting organization roles

Setting folder permissions

Setting dashboard permissions

Establishing teams

Setting up a team

Team members

Team settings

Permission rules

Administering users and organizations

Managing users

Disabling or deleting a user

Elevating a user to Super Admin

Setting user organizations

Organization admin and Super Admin roles

Managing organizations

Creating a new organization

Renaming and setting the organization preferences

Switching between organizations

Summary

Authentication with External Services

Technical requirements

Authenticating with OpenLDAP

Setting up an OpenLDAP server

Configuring Grafana to use LDAP

Testing the Grafana configuration

Adding a user to OpenLDAP

Looking up a user in Grafana

Authenticating with GitHub

Authenticating with Google

Authenticating with Okta

Summary

Cloud Monitoring

Configuring an AWS CloudWatch data source

Creating the policy

Creating the user

Configure the new data source

Configuring a Microsoft Azure Monitor data source

Registering the Grafana application

Setting the application role

Generating application Secrets

Configuring the Azure Monitor data source

Configuring Azure Log Analytics

Generating the API key for Application Insights Details

Configuring a Google Stackdriver data source

Enabling Google Cloud APIs

Creating a Google Service Account

Configuring a Google Stackdriver data source

Summary

Other Books You May Enjoy

Leave a review - let other readers know what you think

Preface

Grafana is an open source analytics platform used to analyze and monitor time-series data. This beginner's guide will help you get to grips with Grafana's new features for querying, visualizing, and exploring metrics and logs, regardless of where they are stored.

This book begins by showing you how to install and set up the Grafana server. You'll explore the workings of various components of the Grafana interface, along with its security features, and you will learn how to visualize and monitor data using InfluxDB, Prometheus, Logstash, and Elasticsearch. This Grafana book covers the advanced features of the Graph panel and shows you how Stat, Table, Bar, Gauge, and Text are used. You'll build dynamic dashboards to perform end-to-end analytics and label and organize dashboards into folders to make them easier to find. As you progress through it, this book delves into the administrative aspects of Grafana by creating alerts, setting permissions for teams, and implementing user authentication. Along with exploring Grafana's multi-cloud monitoring support, you'll also learn about Grafana's Loki system, which is a backend logger for users running Prometheus and Kubernetes.

By the end of this book, you'll have gained all the knowledge you need to start building interactive dashboards.

Who this book is for

This book is for business intelligence developers, business analysts, data analysts, and anyone interested in performing time-series data analysis and monitoring using Grafana. Those looking to create and share interactive dashboards or looking to get up to speed with the latest features of Grafana will also find this book useful. Although no prior knowledge of Grafana is required, basic knowledge of data visualization and some experience with Python programming will help you understand the concepts covered in this book.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Data Visualization with Grafana, provides a brief introduction to the use of data visualization in general and specifically in Grafana. We will then move on to installing a Grafana server onto your machine, using either a native installer or a Docker container. Launching the server and connecting to it with a web browser will also be covered.

Chapter 2, A Tour of the Grafana Interface, explores the workings of the major interface components once you have loaded the Grafana web app.

Chapter 3, An Introduction to the Graph Panel, dives into the Graph panel for a closer look at how to work with the major components of the panel after creating a test data source. We will also identify common panel elements in preparation for looking at other panels.

Chapter 4, Connecting Grafana to a Data Source, shows you how to install a supported data source (such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, or Elasticsearch) as a Docker container, load an actual time-series dataset, and visualize the data.

Chapter 5, Visualizing Data in the Graph Panel, is where we will show some of the more advanced features of the Graph panel.

Chapter 6, Visualization Panels in Grafana, takes a quick tour of the other major panels (Singlestat, Table, Heatmap, and Text) and how they're used. We will hold back on looking at the Dashboard and Alert List panels for later chapters.

Chapter 7, Creating Your First Dashboard, shows how to build a simple dashboard and some panels. We will explore the major components of a dashboard. Finally, we will become familiar with the dashboard interface by moving and resizing panels.

Chapter 8, Working with Advanced Dashboard Features, explores the powerful advanced features of the dashboard, including annotations, templating with variables, and dashboard linking, as well as techniques for sharing dashboards.

Chapter 9, Grafana Alerting, shows you how to create threshold alerts in the graph and connect them to notification channels.

Chapter 10, Exploring Logs with Grafana Loki, uses Loki and Explore to answer questions about a log dataset.

Chapter 11, Organizing Dashboards, shows you how to label dashboards and organize them into folders to make them easier to find.

Chapter 12, Managing Permissions for Users and Teams, shows you how to manage user permissions using teams.

Chapter 13, Authentication with External Services, shows you how managers can connect user authentication to a variety of external services.

Chapter 14, Cloud Monitoring, shows you how Grafana can provide monitoring support for cloud service infrastructure.

To get the most out of this book

In order to complete the majority of the exercises in this book, you will need to download and install Docker with Docker Compose. For the examples in the book, we will be downloading and installing other software and datasets, along with Grafana and Loki, so you will need an internet connection. You could download and install each software package independently, but besides Grafana itself, our tutorial instructions are designed to work with Docker. We do that so that all software dependencies and network management can be encapsulated within Docker Compose.

We will run a fair amount of software from the command line, so you should be comfortable with typing commands into a shell like Bash or Windows Command Prompt:

In order to follow along with the exercises in Chapter 13, Authentication with External Services, you will need accounts with GitHub, Google, and Okta. To follow the exercises in Chapter 14, Cloud Monitoring, you will need to create an account with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

The examples and software in this book have not been validated for security. They require an external internet connection and leverage open source software under a variety of licenses, so if you intend to use any of this software within a security-conscious computing environment (such as in an education or corporate environment), it is highly recommended that you consult your local IT professionals in advance.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code in yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code. Each chapter folder includes dashboards, docker-compose.yml files, and a Makefile to help out when running some of the command-line tools.

Having an interest in science in general and data science, in particular, will go a long way toward making this book interesting and useful. It would also be helpful to have some programming experience with a scripting language such as Python, but since all the code is included, you can run it directly from a clone of the book's GitHub repository. Some familiarity with relational databases will help you understand some of the terminology and concepts behind time-series databases.

I hope to show, with the examples in this book, how easy it is to build simple data visualization pipelines with Grafana and today's open source tools. I also hope this book will inspire and empower you to seek out your own datasets to acquire, analyze, and visualize. Best of luck!

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packt.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

Log in or register at www.packt.com.

Select the Support tab.

Click on Code Downloads.

Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows

Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac

7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Grafana-7.0. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available athttps://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here:https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781838826581_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText:Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles.Here is an example:The first line of our main() function sets up the logging level.

A block of code is set as follows:

def main():

    logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO)

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

% docker-compose down

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: Click on Create | Dashboard; you should see a panel with three buttons.

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book,mention the book title in the subject of your message and email us [email protected].

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visitwww.packtpub.com/support/errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details.

Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us [email protected] a link to the material.

If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visitauthors.packtpub.com.

Reviews

Please leave a review. Once you have read and used this book, why not leave a review on the site that you purchased it from? Potential readers can then see and use your unbiased opinion to make purchase decisions, we at Packt can understand what you think about our products, and our authors can see your feedback on their book. Thank you!

For more information about Packt, please visit packt.com.

Getting Started with Grafana

In this section, you will learn how to install a Grafana server and create a dashboard with a single panel.

This section is comprised of the following chapters:

Chapter 1, Introduction to Data Visualization with Grafana

Chapter 2, A Tour of the Grafana Interface

Chapter 3, An Introduction to the Graph Panel

Introduction to Data Visualization with Grafana

Welcome to Learn Grafana 7.0! Together, we will explore Grafana, an exciting, multi-faceted visualization tool for data exploration, analysis, and alerting. We will learn how to install Grafana, become familiar with some of its many features, and even use it to investigate publicly available real-world datasets.

Whether you are an engineer watching terabytes of metrics for a critical system fault, an administrator sifting through a haystack of log output looking for the needle of an application error, or just a curious citizen eager to know how your city works, Grafana can help you monitor, explore, and analyze data. The key to getting a handle on big data is the ability to visualize it.

But before we find out how Grafana gives you that ability, let's briefly review a few basic concepts behind data visualization.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

Data and visualization – an overview of the data landscape and how visualization is a useful