Learn Grafana 7.0: A beginner's guide to getting well versed in analytics, interactive dashboards, and monitoring

A comprehensive introduction to help you get up and running with creating interactive dashboards to visualize and monitor time-series data in no time

Key Features

• Install, set up, and configure Grafana for real-time data analysis and visualization
• Visualize and monitor data using data sources such as InfluxDB, Prometheus, and Elasticsearch
• Explore Grafana's multi-cloud support with Microsoft Azure, Amazon CloudWatch, and Google Stackdriver

Book 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

Who this book is for

This book is for business intelligence developers, business analysts, data analysts, and anyone interested in performing time-series data analysis and monitoring using Grafana. Those looking to create and share interactive dashboards or looking to get up to speed with the latest features of Grafana will also find this book useful. Although no prior knowledge of Grafana is required, basic knowledge of data visualization and some experience in Python programming will help you understand the concepts covered in the book.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Data Visualization with Grafana
2. A Tour of the Grafana Interface
3. An Introduction to the Graph Panel
4. Connecting Grafana to a Data Source
5. Visualizing Data in the Graph Panel
6. Visualization Panels In Grafana
7. Creating your First Dashboard
8. Working with Advanced Dashboard Features
9. Grafana Alerting
10. Exploring Logs With Grafana's Loki
11. Organizing Dashboards
12. Managing Permissions For Users and Teams
13. Authentication with External Services
14. Cloud Monitoring

Eric Salituro is currently a Senior Software Engineer with the Enterprise Data and Analytics Platform team at Zendesk. He has an IT career spanning over 30 years, over 20 of which were in the motion picture industry working as a pipeline technical director and software developer for innovative and creative studios like DreamWorks, Digital Domain, and Pixar. Before moving to Zendesk, he worked at Pixar helping to manage and maintain their production render farm as a Senior Software Developer. Among his accomplishments, there was the development of a Python API toolkit for Grafana aimed at streamlining the creation of rendering metrics dashboards.