Chapter 6. Dashboarding with Grafana
When you get an alert or want to check on the current performance of your systems, dashboards will be your first port of call. The expression browser that you have seen up to now is fine for ad hoc graphing and when you need to debug your PromQL, but it’s not designed to be used as a dashboard.
What do we mean by dashboard? A set of graphs, tables, and other visualizations of your systems. You might have a dashboard for global traffic, which services are getting how much traffic, and with what latency. For each of those services you would likely have a dashboard of its latency, errors, request rate, instance count, CPU usage, memory usage, and service-specific metrics. Drilling down, you could have a dashboard for particular subsystems or each service, or a garbage collection dashboard that can be used with any Java application.
Grafana is a popular tool with which you can build such dashboards for many different monitoring and nonmonitoring systems, including Graphite, InfluxDB, Jaeger, Elasticsearch, and PostgreSQL. It is the recommended tool for you to create dashboards when using Prometheus, and is continuously improving its Prometheus support.
In this chapter we introduce using Grafana with Prometheus, extending the Prometheus and Node Exporter you set up in Chapter 2.
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