Name: Learn Grafana 7.0
Brand: Packt
SKU: 9781838826581
Availability: InStock

Welcome to Learn Grafana 7.0! Together, we will explore Grafana, an exciting, multi-faceted visualization tool for data exploration, analysis, and alerting. We will learn how to install Grafana, become familiar with some of its many features, and even use it to investigate publicly available real-world datasets.

Whether you are an engineer watching terabytes of metrics for a critical system fault, an administrator sifting through a haystack of log output looking for the needle of an application error, or just a curious citizen eager to know how your city works, Grafana can help you monitor, explore, and analyze data. The key to getting a handle on big data is the ability to visualize it.

But before we find out how Grafana gives you that ability, let's briefly review a few basic concepts behind data visualization.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

Data and visualization – an overview of the data landscape and how visualization is a useful solution
Why Grafana? What makes Grafana an attractive solution?
Installing Grafana – getting the Grafana application installed and running
Connecting to the Grafana server – launching the application from a web browser

Description

Grafana is an open-source analytical platform used to analyze and monitoring time-series data. This beginner's guide will help you get to grips with Grafana's new features for querying, visualizing, and exploring metrics and logs no matter where they are stored. The book begins by showing you how to install and set up the Grafana server. You'll explore the working mechanism of various components of the Grafana interface along with its security features, and learn how to visualize and monitor data using, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Logstash, and Elasticsearch. This Grafana book covers the advanced features of the Graph panel and shows you how Stat, Table, Bar Gauge, and Text are used. You'll build dynamic dashboards to perform end-to-end analytics and label and organize dashboards into folders to make them easier to find. As you progress, the book delves into the administrative aspects of Grafana by creating alerts, setting permissions for teams, and implementing user authentication. Along with exploring Grafana's multi-cloud monitoring support, you'll also learn about Grafana Loki, which is a backend logger for users running Prometheus and Kubernetes. By the end of this book, you'll have gained all the knowledge you need to start building interactive dashboards.

What you will learn

Find out how to visualize data using Grafana Understand how to work with the major components of the Graph panel Explore mixed data sources, query inspector, and time interval settings Discover advanced dashboard features such as annotations, templating with variables, dashboard linking, and dashboard sharing techniques Connect user authentication to Google, GitHub, and a variety of external services Find out how Grafana can provide monitoring support for cloud service infrastructures