Grafana#
Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization tool. It allows you to query, create dashboards, explore, and alert on metrics when connected to supported data sources.
We use Grafana to visualize the metrics that we source from our [User Workload Monitoring][../uwm]. These monitoring dashboards are useful for visualizing the metrics (such as Prometheus metrics) collected from the applications to track and analyze the system’s overall health.
The dashboards can be altered, saved and reused as per your specific monitoring needs.
Dashboards can be represented by the GrafanaDashboard custom resource or by their raw JSON files. You can find example monitoring dashboards defined in separate JSON files for each of the Operate First managed applications in our apps repo. For more information on how the Grafana dashboards are defined, please refer to this documentation.
Get Access to Grafana#
Grafana can be accessed at: https://grafana.operate-first.cloud/
For Grafana Viewer access please add your GitHub handle to: grafana-viewer For Grafana Editor access please add your GitHub handle to: grafana-editor
Adding the Dashboards#
To add your dashboards to Grafana, you will need to create a GrafanaDashboard custom resource. To do this, you can follow the instructions available here.
Using the Dashboards#
Grafana dashboards can easily be exported and imported, either from the UI or from the HTTP API. Dashboards are exported in Grafana JSON format, and contain everything you need (layout, variables, styles, data sources, queries, etc) to import the dashboard at a later time.
You can import these dashboards in Grafana either by pasting the dashboard JSON text directly into the text area or directly uploading the JSON file. Make sure to add/connect your data sources to Grafana and pick what data source you want the dashboard to use.
For more details on importing/exporting dashboards, you can refer to the Grafana documentation here.