
Grafana 2.0 Released - eloycoto
http://grafana.org/blog/2015/04/20/Grafana-2-Released.html
======
kstenerud
One quick note to people writing release notes pages:

Often these pages get posted to news aggregators, and the people who click on
those links are not as likely to be familiar with your product. A quick 1-2
line elevator pitch at the top would do wonders.

~~~
sean_the_geek
Couldn't' agree more! I am interested but struggling to get exactly what it
does..is it like Gephi..who knows???

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Guillaume86
How does that compare to the ELK (ElasticSearch/LogStash/Kibana) stack? (Is it
even right to compare?)

I'm currently evaluating ElasticSearch + Kibana to handle
metrics/errors/application logs in our web app, it's impressive but Kibana is
lacking a lot of features to be complete IMO.

Good point for ELK in my case is that it runs on windows which is not the case
of InfluxDB it seems (running on windows is a requirement in my company
unfortunately).

~~~
phildougherty
It's a similar web interface (Grafana is based on Kibana), but for different
things.

ELK is best for deciphering large amounts of data from logs IMHO. Yes logstash
has tons of plugins for third party monitoring systems, but generally speaking
you're going to dump your web server access/error logs and syslogs into your
ELK setup.

Grafana makes graphite/influxdb more useful and is by far and away the best
option available. Usually you're going to be tracking things like
cpu/memory/diskio/network traffic, but also anything from StatsD in your
Grafana setup.

Combining the two systems into one could be neat, but they work great on their
own and have their own benefits.

~~~
eloycoto
I'm using Grafana + Influxdb + statsd and I'm quite happy:

\- In our django/python apps I'm using statsd client \- For server monitoring
I'm using diamond \- For dashboards I'm using grafana.

I have in a few clicks all company information. I used ELK service, but only
for logs but queries were difficult for me.

But, ELK is great for PFsense routers[[http://elijahpaul.co.uk/monitoring-
pfsense-2-1-logs-using-el...](http://elijahpaul.co.uk/monitoring-
pfsense-2-1-logs-using-elk-logstash-kibana-elasticsearch/)], or you can use
[http://packetbeat.com/](http://packetbeat.com/) if you want to monitor all
your servers.

Last week I spoke in a local community about my stack. Here you have my slides
+ examples:

[http://acalustra.com/statsd-talk-at-python-vigo-
meetup.html](http://acalustra.com/statsd-talk-at-python-vigo-meetup.html)

Regards

------
seanwilson
From the homepage:

> An open source, feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor for
> Graphite, InfluxDB & OpenTSDB.

~~~
bbrazil
Looks like Prometheus support is in the works too:
[https://github.com/grafana/grafana-
plugins/pull/13](https://github.com/grafana/grafana-plugins/pull/13)

That repo also has Atlas, Zabbix and KairosDB plugins.

------
phildougherty
I think the most useful feature in Grafana for me has been Templating. It's
really powerful and works well in an AutoScaling environment where things come
and go. with graphite-web it would be a fight to keep the graphs collecting
the right data points, or updating them if your hostname scheme changes, etc.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
In an autoscaling environment, you just need to keep your metric paths
consistent. Then all you need is wildcard queries. E.g., CPU userspace cycles
on all your instances should be like:

    
    
        provider.region.vpc.group.instance-id.os.cpu.user
    

E.g.:

    
    
        aws.us-west-1.prod.web-front.i-4df567a9.os.cpu.user
    

Then wildcard queries will provide you aggregate stats at any level you like.

It's really a feature of how Graphite queries work.

\--------------------

All that being said, I agree that Grafana is pretty awesome.

~~~
phildougherty
That's true. I guess what I prefer about doing it in Grafana is that the
interface for managing complex graphs with overlays of different metrics, and
ones using wildcards to match groups of metrics is just way easier.

------
Rygu
> The Graph panel now supports 3 logarithmic scales, log base 10, log base 32,
> log base 1024. Logarithmic y-axis scales are very useful when rendering many
> series of different order of magnitude on the same scale (eg. latency,
> network traffic, and storage)

Have been waiting eagerly for logarithmic scale support.

~~~
bbrazil
What's base 32 used for?

~~~
torkelo
Useful for display series that represent storage space or IO, get get y axis
ticks like 1 KB, 32KB, 1MB, 32MB, 1GB
[http://play.grafana.org/dashboard/db/new-features-
in-v20?pan...](http://play.grafana.org/dashboard/db/new-features-
in-v20?panelId=2&fullscreen)

------
setheron
I remember wanting to use graphite for a pet project and stumbled across early
release Grafana. I'm amazed at all the nagging items I had (even though I
still used it) have been resolved. The CORS, shipping with its own backend,
not needing elastic search (such a pain!) and sharing graphs are stellar.
Truly amazing.

------
anton_gogolev
On a _very_ tangentially related note: we've recently open-sourced our .NET
port of StatsD/Graphite and it's available under MIT license at
[https://bitbucket.org/aeroclub-it/statsify](https://bitbucket.org/aeroclub-
it/statsify)

~~~
torkelo
interesting! I am working on a windows build of grafana 2 right now. Does
statsify have a /render and /metrics/find api that is compatible with
graphite? If it had grafana could use it.

~~~
anton_gogolev
It has something similar to "/render"[0], but it's not Graphite-compatible.
There's also support for "/find", but it is currently not the part of the
public API.

Adding Graphite-compatible endpoints should be fairly easy and this can really
open up a lot of integration opportunities.

[0]: [https://bitbucket.org/aeroclub-
it/statsify/wiki/Home#markdow...](https://bitbucket.org/aeroclub-
it/statsify/wiki/Home#markdown-header-retrieving-graphing-and-analyzing-
metrics)

~~~
torkelo
Could you move that project to github? I think that project has great
potential coupled with Grafana.

I will add windows builds to the install and download pages today.

Here is a windows build for grafana 2.0.1
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/grafanarel/winbuilds/dist/grafana-2...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/grafanarel/winbuilds/dist/grafana-2.0.1.windows-x64.zip)

------
distantsounds
What's the recommended backend for this? I tried it with InfluxDB but felt
that the feature set wasn't really up there, I couldn't get graphs to display
the data I wanted.

We have a graphite instance elsewhere but it's running into disk space issues
- will that be an issue here, too?

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Graph an is a wholly JavaScript "chart display" front end that hacienda onto a
grpahite-query-compatible server. This is usually the graphite server that
usually is storing rrd data into a carbon database.

However there are it seems a wide variety of choices. My view is if any form
of column orientated data structure is struggling, try sharding your time
series long before you swap technologies.

------
simonpantzare
Very nice, congrats on the release! Had it up and running and our Grafana 1.x
dashboards imported in about 15min.

I was intrigued reading about the plans for alert support. Any pointers on
where to start looking for somebody that may want to help build it? :)

Would love to buy a coffee or beer some time in Stockholm.

~~~
torkelo
That is awesome (that the upgrade was that smooth).

I am going this meetup at DICE on Thursday,
[https://sites.google.com/site/stockholmgtug/Home/20150423](https://sites.google.com/site/stockholmgtug/Home/20150423)

------
T-A
I wanted to try

[http://docs.grafana.org/v2.0/installation/windows/](http://docs.grafana.org/v2.0/installation/windows/)

but when I click the "build from source" link, I get "Sorry, page not found.".
:(

~~~
torkelo
strange works now.

------
emilsedgh
Just started using Grafana+Influxdb this week. Could not be happier :)

Congrats.

~~~
torkelo
Thanks!

------
dyb
ElasticSearch was one of the data sources to grafana [1.8.1]. I do not see
anything that points to "still works" in the docs. Has this changed?

------
BrainInAJar
iframe embedded graphs would've helped me out immensely 8 months ago, So happy
to see them now

------
copsarebastards
What is Grafana? I'm having trouble getting a clear explanation of what it is.

~~~
Mahn
Picture phpMyAdmin, but for metrics and time series data. You point it to a
time series database (such as Graphite or InfluxDB) and the app draws the
charts for you with whatever settings you need, and puts them together in
pretty dashboards for easy consumption.

------
sikhnerd
This looks great!

FYI, the demo site link is broken (missing a : )

~~~
torkelo
Thanks for spotting that, fix in publishing now!

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ClawsX
AAwesome! Upgrading this week!

------
andyl
Oh - this is Marvelous. Congrats Torkel!! We plan to put your new multi-tenant
features to work!

Now waiting for InfluxDB 0.9 - then we're off to the races.

~~~
Mahn
There's a fork for InfluxDB 0.9:
[https://github.com/influxdb/grafana/tree/influx-0.9rc4](https://github.com/influxdb/grafana/tree/influx-0.9rc4)

No idea how well it works, haven't tried it yet, but I would imagine it's
still incomplete.

