Monitoring Taxonomy

Chapter 8. traditional.free_open.processors.data

The “new breed” of metrics-centric, open source monitoring systems more or less all categorize here. These tools typically are agnostic with regard to the data they recieve, and they do an excellent job of visualizing metrics.

Grafana: The “Uber” of Metric Frontends

Grafana is a savvy, modular web frontend for a host of metrics-oriented monitoring systems, including Graphite, InfluxDB, OpenTSDB and Prometheus. It ships with a backend server written in GO and uses Flot in the browser to plot the data. Compared to all of its open source competition, and even most of its commercial competition, Grafana is a far more elegant and user-friendly metrics UI, enabling you to explore, find, and visualize ad hoc metrics from many different backend monitoring systems, quickly and effectively.

Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?

Not applicable. Grafana queries already collected data at rest in a time series database.

Measurement Resolution

Measurement resolution depends on the underlying data store you’re using as well as the data itself. Generally speaking Grafana will plot whatever you are able to measure, but it does have features like MaxDataPoints to protect you from accidently making queries that result in an overabundance of browser-choking data.

Data Storage

Grafana can store metadata (dashboard configurations, user credentials, etc.) in an embedded sqlite3 database, MySQL, or Postgres. The primary underlying data store for your metrics ...