Grafana #

• Grafana is an opensource observability tool to query and visualize the data using interactive dashboards, etc.
• Grafana is one of the most popular companion solution with Prometheus, which can be queried from Grafana.
• Grafana supports other time-series databases like Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Graphite, monitoring platforms such as Sensu, Icinga, Checkmk,Zabbix, Netdata, and PRTG; SIEMs such as Elasticsearch and Splunk; and other data sources.
• GitHub Repo: https://github.com/grafana/grafana
• Developer: Grafana Labs, Language: Go

Cloud Offering #

• Grafana offers managed service as a cloud offering. You can register for Free to use Grafana Cloud using GitHub or Google account credentials by clicking here.
• Check out Pricing here. Their Free tier offers 3 users, 14 day retention, Synthetic, and Alerting with 10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces.
• Pro has Grafana ML, SSO/SAML integration, Query caching, Reporting, Data source permissions, etc.

Monitoring Kubernetes (Local Cluster - Grafana on Cloud) #

• My URL: https://ankurkumarz.grafana.net/
• Refer to full documentation here.
• Install the Agent in Kubernetes default cluster

MANIFEST_URL=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/agent/main/production/kubernetes/agent-bare.yaml NAMESPACE=default /bin/sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/grafana/agent/release/production/kubernetes/install-bare.sh)" | kubectl apply -f -

• Run the following commands to install kube-state-metrics:

helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts && helm repo update && helm install ksm prometheus-community/kube-state-metrics --set image.tag=v2.2.0

• Configure and restart the agent (instructions in above doc link)

K8S Default Dashboards #

Key Findings #

• Grafana is a de facto standard for visualization with real-time timeseries database like Prometheus

• Key competition: Elastic’s Kibana, Cloud-providers native experience (e.g. AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor) or Observability/APM solutions like Dynatrace, New Relic, Splunk, etc.

• Grafana can be integrate with all the above tools to visualize data in a single place.

• Grafana key integrators:

  • Monitor Azure Services using Grafana

• Fully-managed Grafana services are being offered by:

  • AWS Fully Managed Service
  • Grafana Labs signed partnership with Microsoft Azure to deliver first-party Grafana Service. Click here to read more.

• End-to-end Observability (Grafana Labs offers a managed service)

  • Visualization with Grafana
  • Metrics with Prometheus and Graphite
  • Logs with Loki
  • Traces with Tempo

Managed Service by Grafana Cloud by Grafana Labs #