
Grafana 3.0 Stable Released - torkelo
http://grafana.org/blog/2016/05/11/grafana-3-0-stable-released.html
======
torkelo
Here are some release highlights :)

    
    
      * Big UI improvements and polish
      * Redesigned plugin architecture and SDK  
      * Grafana-cli command line tool shipped with grafana, 
        installs plugins 
      * Persisted dashboard playlists
      * Preferences like home dashboard, timezone and theme on 
        org and user level
      * New plugin types, Apps, and Panels.
      * New platform site built around Grafana at Grafana.net
        * Plugin repository
        * Dashboard repository (coming soon)
        * Hosted Grafana and Hosted metrics (coming soon)
        * Monitoring and backups of on-prem Grafana (coming soon)
      * Annotation popovers can contain clickable links
      * Templated data source Easiy reuse the same dashboard for multiple data source instances
      * OSX Homebrew support Homebrew installation instructions
      * Support for InfluxDB 0.11+ (and new functions)
    

Youtube screencast with feature showcase:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kJyQKgk_oY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kJyQKgk_oY)

~~~
switch007
You (and the other contributors) are a machine. Congratulations on the
release!

~~~
torkelo
Thank you!

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MasterScrat
Things I wish were included in that release:

\- Some amount of caching/pre-fetching so moving the graph around doesn't take
a few seconds each time. At least in the cases where I am zooming in and all
the data is already loaded on the client it shouldn't need a network round
trip.

\- The ability to drag the charts left and right by keeping the shift key
pressed, as is the default on Dygraphs charts (dygraphs.com)

\- Switch from Flot to Dygraphs would make client-side rendering faster (at
least for the typical line charts)

~~~
torkelo
Grafana is mainly built around time series databases that have good roll ups
and are usually quite fast. Graphite queries usually only take 50-150ms
(except some rare cases). This is changing a bit with newer slower time series
databases that don't have good roll ups or are generally slow.

The main problem with prefetching or doing delta fetches is that some queries
depend on the whole time range to execute (like moving average, integral,
derivate).

------
jsmeaton
I'm a very happy Grafana user. The move to a server based app worried me at
first, but it's been humming along nicely the entire time. It's a shame that
graphite is still so hard to install/configure (at least from rhel 6 and lower
- things might be better on other distros/versions) though. If you're looking
to start making some money as a business, I'd be spending a bit of time making
sure the data sources are as easy to stand up as possible.

Congratulations on the new release and, really, fantastic work!

~~~
Shish2k
FWIW I've switched from Graphite to InfluxDB as a drop-in replacement (ie,
influxdb natively accepts graphite-formatted data, I'm ignoring all the extra
nice influx features), and I've found that they're both really easy to set up
and keep running together :)

------
XorNot
No fullscreen mode via a URL still it seems? It's a big missing feature for
when you want to setup overhead monitors and the like.

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gedrap
Looks like a nice release! One thing I really miss in grafana and seems like
it's not included is alerts.

It would be so damn convenient to have data visualization and alerts on the
same system because usually they are strongly related from the user point of
view. And, well, one thing less to setup and maintain.

However, I am aware of the debate whether alerts do actually belong to
grafana, or should it be responsible for visualization only and seems like
they have settled with the later. Which definitely makes sense because once
you start to expand to alerting it's a whole new world and I respect the
choice. So yeah, I am a bit sad as a user, however I totally get the authors.

Maybe it will be available as a plugin?

That being said... What tools HNers are using for placing alerts on data
stored in graphite?

~~~
aidos
I'd love to hear how others manage it too. I have a bunch of little python
scripts in cron jobs that pull / compare numbers from graphite and then post
to slack. Adhoc but at least there was nothing much to set up / maintain and
it's totally flexible.

As things expand though I'd definitely like to move to something to look after
it for me.

~~~
endymi0n
We're extremely happy campers here combining the Grafana dashboard with
[https://prometheus.io/](https://prometheus.io/) Datastore and Alerts. That
project has some serious traction and is one of just a few that seems actually
built for the cloud and distributed systems _first_ , as it's primarily role
and not host based.

~~~
duncanawoods
Can I ask how you manage logs?

My minimal understanding is that prometheus is time-series only so you'd have
to supplement with something like ElasticSearch to aggregate logs. Does this
mean you are alerting only on metrics or have multiple alert systems or ...?

~~~
coredog64
We run Grafana for production dashboards with a KairosDB (we are a C* shop)
and use ELK for text logs. Grafana can add annotations from ElasticSearch, but
beyond that we are looking at our ES alerting options.

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mixmastamyk
I've used grafana from a browser at a company once, and liked it a lot.
However, when I've looked at installing it myself, the docs immediately start
talking about other projects, like influxdb and elasticsearch, things I know
little about nor want to. Conversely, the things I do want to know about, what
is it written in, architecture, how to send data?, etc, are missing or buried
somewhere.

Is there an easy tutorial on how to start sending it data after install?
That's all I want. Also, would like to use standard tools like curl, python,
and postgres, is that possible?

~~~
pstuart
Technically speaking, you don't send data to Grafana -- it polls a data source
(like influxdb, elasticsearch and graphite).

~~~
mixmastamyk
Ok, that's good information I've never realized, perhaps part of the problem.
Or the docs' problem.

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JorgeGT
It would have been nice to warn beforehand that support for InfluxDB-0.8.X may
be broken. I'm having the same issue as
[https://github.com/grafana/influxdb-08-datasource/issues/3](https://github.com/grafana/influxdb-08-datasource/issues/3)
so if you are still using 0.8.x be careful with this upgrade!

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cstuder
I have some random historical meteorological data (multiple time series, ~3
million values, a couple of parameters, nothing big) lying around in a MySQL
database which I would love to explore. Grafana looks like a nice tool to at
least visualize it.

Which supported data source would you recommend for a quick test ride?

~~~
chillydawg
Not openTSDB. That's by far the most difficult to set up. It's also the best
in terms of scalability and performance.

~~~
SEJeff
Actually, druid.io pretty handily beats it. I've witnessed (another team
member) scale opentsdb to an obscene number of writes, but getting data out
with more than 3-4 tags for a near-realtime dashboard was pretty much
impossible.

Here is a comment on druid I posted recently:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654715)

