
Grafana v6.2 - el_duderino
https://grafana.com/blog/2019/05/22/grafana-v6.2-released/
======
mikepurvis
Tried Grafana briefly a year or two ago, and I wanted to like it, but similar
to Kibana, it's laser-focused on the task of realtime monitoring current data.
I wanted to use it for a high-level view of historical stuff (robot data
recordings from ROS), and there was a lot of really basic functionality for
that use case that just wasn't there at all.

Even stuff as basic as being able to pan a plot back and forth after you've
zoomed in— here's the four year old ticket for that in their issue tracker:
[https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1387](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1387)

I ended up generating Bokeh plots and had a much better time. So Grafana is
great for what it's great at, but I don't recommend it for uses other than
current-moment data.

~~~
nopzor
thanks for the feedback. there's definitely a lot of validity to what you're
saying, for what you describe.

grafana has traditionally been used for 'real time dashboarding and analytics'
in the IT/devops world. that's the original use case, and its sweet spot, as
you allude to.

but, since the beginning, the mission of the open source grafana project has
had nothing to do with IT per se. it was about democratizing metrics; helping
teams understand their 'systems', by breaking down silos between databases and
people.

over the last few years, interesting things are afoot in grafana community.
we're seeing grafana used for more and more non-IT use cases. it's being
deployed in the industrial and business worlds. about 10-20% of the grafana
community now deal with things that have nothing to do with IT/devops.

the 'systems' are no longer limited to things like servers, switches,
containers and clusters. these emerging users deal with things like
temperature sensors, dollars, robots and ambulances. we are making progress in
bringing grafana to these worlds, while also ideally improving it overall.

there's tangential threads in various stages of recent completeness (none of
which solve your specific issue admittedly). things like sql support, general
focus on ad-hoc analysis with ('explore'), the upcoming abstraction around
being able to better use ui components within grafana ('grafana/ui'), improved
support for tabular data, new panels, etc.

sorry about the four year old issue; i'd be lying if i said there weren't
myriad things we'd like to do, that don't make the cut not due to desire but
due to time and resources.

again, thanks for the feedback, please know that we're very interested in
continuing to develop and improve grafana for use cases like yours!

-r

[disclosure, very biased and opinionated response. am co-founder/ceo at
grafana labs. lucky enough to work with torkel and the team on making grafana
better]

~~~
mikepurvis
Thanks for the response and for a pretty cool open source project! Sorry my
comment dumping on it ended up being the top of the thread here. FWIW, I
definitely had a nicer time trying out Grafana than I ever have fighting with
Kibana, and I definitely liked that I was able to use it with SQL based
datasources rather than just Elastic.

------
markbnj
A fun little thing to do if you want to play around with the new release:
install prometheus, prometheus node_exporter, grafana, and grab the
node_exporter full dashboard from the grafana site. In like 10 minutes you've
got a pretty cool system info dashboard for your laptop :).

~~~
latchkey
I did this for 1500 raspberry pi-class litecoin miners. It was _awesome_ to be
able to see all the data in realtime across so many devices.

------
tbarbugli
Lazy loading is a feature I was waiting for long time, hopefully this time is
here to stay!

~~~
retzkek
If your dashboards have so many panels that lazy loading is important, you
need to reconsider your dashboard design. Endlessly scrolling to find the
panel you're interested in makes for a painful user experience, and it makes
it harder to compare series across panels.

I aim to keep dashboards no larger than what can be displayed in a single
window on a desktop, with perhaps some supplementary plots below, often in a
collapsed row. I make heavy use of "drill-down" links, preferably from tables
or single-stats (or more often the "status panel" for denser displays [1]), or
in panel notes otherwise, to dive further into the data.

When designing a dashboard, I ask myself "what story is this dashboard going
to tell?", and as with a good novel I try to keep from straying too far from
that narrative, branching side-plots out into new dashboards as needed.

[1] [https://grafana.com/plugins/vonage-status-
panel](https://grafana.com/plugins/vonage-status-panel)

~~~
mtrpcic
It depends on what your use case for the dashboard is. If the dashboard is
meant for constant display, then yes, too many panels is a bad user
experience. On the other hand, if you're trying to create a "Oh my god
something is wrong in production right now, show me everything so I can see at
a glance" dashboard, I would rather scroll than jump between 3 tabs because of
"aesthetics".

~~~
retzkek
Aesthetics? How about ergonomics? In the same vein as "alert fatigue," having
too many panels on a dashboard (or too many lines on a graph, etc) can
overload the user, and obscure the real issues.

> show me everything so I can see at a glance

Yes, exactly, at a glance, not after scrolling through five pages. With
careful dashboard design, you should be able to see a problem area actually
"at a glance," and then drill-down to pinpoint the actual cause, faster than
you'll find it scrolling through a single large dashboard.

I admit this is something of an ideal to aim for, and it can take a lot of
time and effort to achieve, which may not be available. However, it will pay
off in the "Oh my god something is wrong in production right now" scenario if
you can take that time.

~~~
zepolen
Agree, designing a good dashboard is a skill just like anything else it comes
with experience.

------
NickBusey
Those new gradient bar gauges look great, can't wait to use them on some
environmental data.

------
colechristensen
I have been having some fun recently with Grafana session storage. In the end
it seemed like a database issue which was unavoidable because there aren't
other options for session storage when you use a db (other than downgrading to
5.x)

After endless grinding with configuration options, debugging go code (new
skill) and javascript running in the browser I tried switching out to a local
mariadb and it worked instantly. Lesson learned, be wary of a Galera mysql
cluster. My running but unproved theory that during the login process the
creation of the user token in the db and reading it back happen so quickly
that the item isn't available yet so Grafana can't find it and logs the user
out.

------
BossingAround
If I have a CSV of a number of values (say in the thousands), and what I need
is basically a tool that will create a slick, good-looking graph that compares
two or more of these CSVs, what's the best tool for that? Think JMeter if that
rings any bells.

I honestly just used some basic graph-generation tools which would spit out
PNGs, which is always less than satisfying. I looked at Grafana, but never had
the time to actually try it out. My feeling also was that it was a bit
different of a use-case as I had no real-time data, but I may be totally wrong
here.

~~~
wielebny
We have JMeter to pump the data to InfluxDB and then visualise them in
Grafana.

Additionaly, you can see results while JMeter is still running.

------
dogtail
Waiting for better Loki integration.

~~~
netingle
Loki author here: got some ideas? We’re all ears!

~~~
mgbmtl
Hi! Any plans to release binaries? If I am currently using 1% of ELK features
(I use it for simple log aggregation of servers), but not k8s, would you still
recommend loki?

~~~
netingle
Yes we do! Plan on cutting v0.1 in the next week or so, kubecon kinda got in
the way... I’ll work on adding some binaries to that - what platform you
looking for?

~~~
nickserv
Not the OP but in the same situation. I run Debian 9 on my servers, would be
great to have some debs to try it out.

Thanks!

------
Sytten
Great job. Though I am still waiting for official CSP support, it seems like
it should already be there. Unfortunately the legacy angular code prevents us
from applying any real policy.

