
Grafana 2.0 Alpha - Artemis2
http://grafana.org/blog/2015/02/10/Grafana-2-Alpha-and-preview.html
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Rapzid
I use Grafana at work to great effect. After doing TONS of review on other
graphite front ends and not being satisfied with the usability and flexibility
of any of them I was close to giving up and was considering building my own
solution. Then Grafana appeared from the mist. It has come a long way but from
day one it was very functional. I use the templating system inherited from
Kibana(which Grafana was original based on) to great effect. It allows me to
create drill down and overview dashboards to zoom in on particular sites,
clusters, or servers. Integrating is a snap by linking in with query
parameters from other tools which get fed into the template system. I actually
can't imagine a time without Grafana and would encourage anyone using
graphite(or one of the supported backends like influxDB) to give it a spin.

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easytiger
I'm working at integrating my product with it (prob influxdb if it can handle
the load). I'm worried its going to be one of those products that ends up
everywhere then i won't look quite as magical. It really is that good.

~~~
torkelo
No worry, I will try my best in keeping Grafana UI, design philosophy and
focus intact as it expands its capability.

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shifty3
Can anybody speak to the difference between Graphite+Grafana and the ELK
stack? Are there any fundamental differences in analysis capabilities between
these?

We are currently using ELK for doing some lightweight analysis of user
behavior (we are using Elasticsearch anyway, so this was the easiest way to
get up and running), but as far as I can tell there are some limits to the
Elasticsearch/Kibana combination. For example, there seems to be no way to
correlate separate events, e.g. how many users that performed action A then
performed action B within some time window (or even as the next action). Is
this possible with Graphite?

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torkelo
For correlation between distinct events Graphite or any Time series database
is not the right tool.

Time series are usually more about being able to collect huge amount of
metrics. Metrics that can then be combined, averaged, filtered, put through a
processing pipeline (analytical functions), summarized by different intervals.
All in order to visualize (usually through graphs) recent live trends or long
term trends and statistics.

Grafana is all about maximizing the power and ease of use of the underlying
time series store so the user can focus om on building informative and nice
looking dashboards. It is also about letting users define generic dashboards
through variables that can be used in metric queries, this allows users to
reuse the same dashboard for different servers, apps or experiments as long as
the metric naming follows a consistent pattern.

Grafana also uses Elasticsearch but not for log analytics, but for annotating
graphs with event/log information.

At some point in in the coming 1-3 years log analytics and metric analytics &
visualization is going to converge and be solved/addressed by the same piece
of software. But that is tricky right now without sacrificing either domain.

~~~
shifty3
Thanks for the insight, that's kind of what I expected. Do you know of any
tools/products that can perform this kind of analysis? I looked at the whole
range of web analytics tools/platforms (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Piwiki and
others), but these are very much focused on web analytics, not so much user
behavior inside a (web) application and offer very limited customization. And
they usually do not work offline anyway.

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xzf
Any idea on how to deal with downsampling from graphite? IE don't send such
high resolution to the browser because it can quickly cripple older machines.
Now I know that with graphite I can specify different granularity but I don't
know if there is an easy way to switch between them when looking at a day vs a
week of events.

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moe
Is there a reason why the InfluxDB backed graphs, in edit mode, don't allow to
conveniently select series with dropdown menu's like it does for Graphite
backed ones?

That's the one thing holding me back from giving Grafana a whirl (my younger
self promised me to never touch graphite again).

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torkelo
Its because InfluxDB does not have the same API for exploring the metric name
hierarchy. But that will change with InfluxDB 0.9 where they will introduce
measurements and tags and a lot of inspection queries that will enable a much
better query building experience.

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diziet
I wonder what the backwards compatibility to existing grafana and graphite
implementations will be.

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nopzor
The goal is to have an easy, seamless migration path for existing grafana 1.x
users.

We have a tool/wizard that imports your dashboards from elasticsearch
(removing that dependency for graphite users).

Keep in mind that grafana 2.0 will of course continue to work with graphite,
influxdb and opentsdb for metric storage.

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wereHamster
I have my dashboards stored in influxdb. Will grafana2 be able to read them
directly from there?

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torkelo
yes, but only for the import process that will read them from influxdb and
save them into the grafana database (either embedded sqlite3 or external
mysql, postgres).

InfluxDB is not really suitable as a general purpose data source (storing
dashboards as influxdb metric series was more a temporary solution so influxdb
users did not need to install elasticsearch, and influxdb dashboard storage
did not support tag filtering).

With Grafana 2.0 needs to store a lot more, users, accounts, user starred
dashboards & preferences. So a more general purpose database was needed.

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metabrew
Great news about the backend rendering to PNG. We can't run the current
version on our monitoring screen, because it's powered by a raspberry pi,
which takes about 90 seconds to render all the svg stuff (down to 30seconds
with a Pi v2).

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torkelo
This is probably because you are running Graphite 0.9.12 which does not have
the maxDataPoints feature for the json api, with 0.9.13 it work a lot better.
I know of some who run it on raspberry with decent performance, not great but
far from 90 seconds.

~~~
metabrew
Yes we're on 0.9.12, will be upgrading asap :)

thanks for replying 👍

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lifeisstillgood
How have people found wrapping other non carbon back ends (even own RDBMS) in
graphite-compatible API - in other words I I am collecting time series
somewhere, how simple is it to get grafana as a front end?

~~~
torkelo
There are two datasource plugins here that might help you get a picture how to
add new types of data sources to grafana. There is basically no documentation
for how to write data sources so it requires some reverse enginering (trying
to understand the existing datasources), but there is an interface, and custom
data sources can provide their own UI editors.
[https://github.com/grafana/grafana-
plugins](https://github.com/grafana/grafana-plugins)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Thank you

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beevek
We are using Grafana with OpenTSDB and loving it -- really looking forward to
some of the 2.0 features and about to buy a bunch more TVs for big shiny
Grafana dashboards in our NOC. Way to go guys!

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pavs
Can grafana be used as aa alternative for cacti? Does it support snmp?

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torkelo
Grafana is not a time series store or metric fetching agent. It s dashboard
and graph composer that currently support Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB (and
KariosDB via plugin).

So if you have metrics in one of those time series stores then Grafana is a
really awesome tool for visualizing those metrics.

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andyl
Grafana is fantastic. 2.0 handles multi-user accounts, multi-tenant access,
seamless integration with InfluxDB. Thank you Torkel.

~~~
torkelo
Thank you! Means a lot, been working on this in the dark for a very long time
(I originally though it might be paid version of Grafana). Really great to
have the code public and show of some of the great things the backend will
enable.

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import
Good to see ES requirement will be removed for dashboard storage. Keep up your
good work Torkel!

Are you abondoned your "paid version" ideas?

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torkelo
Yes, everything will be open source. Thanks to Grafana sponsors and me being
part of the Raintank company that will provide SaaS and support services
around Grafana and other existing open source monitoring/metrics projects as
well as new components that we are working on (all open source!)

~~~
mikegioia
Raintank looks really cool, do you have any early details about when it will
launch or the price ranges?

