grafana dashboards as code

grafana dashboards as code

PLACE_HOLDER_FILE- replace the placeholder with file contents- to replace big parts of JSON. 3439. Note that you pass it the name of the data source that you configured with gfdatasource, so it fetches from your Prometheus. Accessibility / color blindness support. I love to hear tips or updates on where this is going. For averaging queries like sum(rate(metric[5m])), which may constitute most of your dashboards, you should consider adding the interval hint (e.g. Very soon, it will be a great experience, once you have assembled some basic functionality and learned the language. Locally, you need to have jsonnet installed. For other organizational concepts, it might be SREs or infrastructure engineers. To manually apply it, open the test dashboard in your Grafana instance, then > JSON Model > copy-paste generated JSON > Save Changes. The next section explains a better way. To install from Grafanas Helm chart, you need to configure it. First write a minimal dashboard as code and save as dashboards/payment-gateway.jsonnet: The last command outputs a valid Grafana dashboard as JSON. No, this is very, very bad! We are in the process of putting together a new generated version of Grafonnet. This is the simplest development workflow. For anybody ending up here. Grafana as code: A complete guide to tools, tips, and tricks Combine rate with sum or sum by. After compiling $ jsonnet -o output.json input.jsonnet , the result can be imported into Grafana. That means lots of lines, colors, and points to look at before getting your question answered: "is this normal or do we have a problem, and where?". Everything between 16% and 33% will be blue. Example to fix that: (sum by (something) (rate(some_metric[15m]))) / sum by (something) (rate(some_metric2[15m])) and ignoring(something) hour() >=6 <21. That YAML file will contain one ConfigMap object per dashboard. Observing only the main business metric(s) is not sufficient. Other concerns are often just opinionated, and you will simply need to take the decision "do we allow it to become a mess or not". Table of Contents Introduction and scope The challenge Unuseful approaches Grafana and Saltstack Alerting with Grafana Roundup References (Links to GitHub for code examples) This is not meant to be a conventional how-to, but strategic advice to help Project code and snippets. Open positions, Check out the open source projects we support Grafana provisioning allows automatic reloading of dashboards from a certain place. Grafana allows choosing to color the background instead of the value line, which I recommend since then your whole screen should look green most of the time (click Panel > Display > Color mode > Background), and your eyes do not need to focus on the color of tiny graph lines. We have done some basic research into each, and found that they all have positives and negatives, and they all will need some extension for our needs. Auto-positioning True/False flag can be used in dashboards context metadata to tell the code the dashboard is a static one. There is not much to see yet though. You can use a text visualization for that. Yes, you heard right! The Weave Cloud team so far have found this to be a happy trade-off. Email update@grafana.com for help. The other values (amber/blue) might then just work, since they are based on percentages. Enterprise Network Dashboard 9. As explained before, use Calculation > Last if only the latest value is relevantyou do not care about the Average API concurrency over 3 hours while debugging an incident, right? When omitting panel IDs is see TypeError: Cannot read property 'toString' of undefined which concludes this feature is not in there yet. You can get around this for a while using custom lint scripts that look at the JSON and tell you if you have got anything wrongthats what we did at first. To use relative thresholds, click Percentage and fill some values. You may want to tweak this to your own use cases. I have looked through Github and google, and found that there are two approaches: I have found dozens of projects that went the way of #1, and no less than 6 projects that have implemented #2. In a modern infrastructure, you might run synthetic test traffic to verify the end-to-end health of your applications. To get started with the Grafana Crossplane provider, install Crossplane in the Kubernetes cluster and use this command to install the provider: During installation of the provider, CRDs for all the resources supported by the Terraform provider are added to the cluster so users can begin defining their Grafana resources as Kubernetes custom resources. To use IT terminology: the metric of payment failures is a significant service level indicator (SLI). March 7, 2023. First flow is obvious. But a programming language such as jsonnet makes the repetitive parts so much more expressive and consistent. Does Grafana expose environment variables of alerts, for me to create my own dashboard and views? If you have inconsistent names, it will take extra effort to repeat each dashboard visualization for each of the conventions, instead of just using labels to distinguish and plot the services (or other traits that you define as label dimensions, such as customers). GrafYAML from Red Hats OpenStack team: https://docs.openstack.org/infra/grafyaml/ To show the colors, you need to set thresholds on the Field tab. For our example of an error metric, you want to know if it goes above a threshold, and sum(rate()) does not strictly require distinction by cluster in the high-level visualizations. Coded dashboards improve quality and allow you to throw out old stuff easily and with the needed 4-eye principle. This metric would typically pertain to the methods "RED" (requests/rate, errors, duration) or "USE" (utilization, saturation, errors). Example Prometheus query: histogram_quantile(0.95, sum(rate(prometheus_http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[2m])) by (le)). Many metrics only produce non-negative numbers. For example, if your revenue is driven by successful outcomes of payments, that should be on your main dashboard of the payment gateway, and represented in alerts. Treat your Grafana instance and database as something that gets reset regularly, from a committed state. However there is a trick- repeating a specific part of the template and replacing the placeholders with different values. Placeholder- string in a template to be replaced with actual data. Setting the maximum may be helpful if you know the number range (e.g. Avoid high-cardinality metrics (many label combinations), since those take up lots of space, and queries take longer. The Y axis will only be sorted numerically once you change the query legend to {{le}}. Im seeing this Maximum call stack size exceeded grafana api upload. Grafana dashboards as ConfigMaps. Note The Grafana UI may change periodically. The high-level dashboard links to those. How can I achieve this using NodeJS. Also, more ergonomic ways of importing dashboards, e.g. There are very valid points against it, such as the missing WYSIWYG support as of 2022-04. Using grafanalib, you can build consistent, powerful dashboards that can easily extend to new services. To find a root cause quickly in case of problems, dashboards must allow drilling down into details. (Learn more in the Grafonnet documentation.). Particularly when you have split into several engineering teams or even have a platform infrastructure / DevOps / SRE team, specific monitoring depending on the teams' respective responsibility makes a lot of sense. As of April 2022, that means metrics, logs, traces, and visualizations based on those concepts. For example, an API serving requests for customers. Grafanas default is to use the browser timezone. Then sometimes, a LogQL query such as sum(count_over_time( [15m])) to look for specific log lines may be what you want (temporarily), instead of developing and maintaining a new metric. Visualization > Display > Colors: I recommend opacity-based coloring with full blue (rgb(0,0,255)) as strongest color, in order to see things without getting eye strain or having to come close to the monitor. For very detailed dashboards, you may have a lot of graphs. Using Grafana 9.4. Side note: for "higher is better" metrics such as customer conversion rate (100% = all customer purchases succeed), you can just turn around the colors (green on top, red on bottom). As mentioned, I think a good solution survives without training, but instead has proper and concise documentation, and the code speaks for itself. Grafana vs workbook vs dashboard - Microsoft Q&A Grafana Labs uses cookies for the normal operation of this website. Floor Plan Dashboard 8. Dashboards are the typical first solution that even small companies or hobbyists can use to quickly get insights of their running software, infrastructure, network, and other data-generating things such as edge devices. Its not ideal, but you can manage. Red and green may not be the best options, but I do not have the experience to give help here. This allows previewing dashboards with development data before a software feature even goes live, and you will have very consistent views across environments. For example in alert configuration Grafanas notification channel is directed by its UID. grafanalib has been far more popular than I could have anticipated. You and your colleagues will surely play around with test dashboards, and mixing them with production-ready, usable ones is not helpful. This article showcases solutions for Grafana and Prometheus, but can also be applied generically for other platforms. If it shows you mainly internet/connectivity issues, follow your way to the payment logs and infrastructure dashboards, for example (which at best would be linked). A counter in Prometheus represents a value that can only increase. grafana: dashboardProviders: dashboardproviders.yaml: apiVersion: 1 providers: - name: 'default' orgId: 1 folder: '' type: file disableDeletion: false Removing all alerts in all dashboards with title prefix: NO_ALERTS_: This will remove all alert attributes in dashboards JSONs. Together with green/yellow/red thresholds, this explains in 2 seconds what the current value is and whether it is problematic. The Grafonnet library and custom object properties are highly Grafana-specific. You should now see the dashboard as described by codecontaining only a text panel that says "Yippie". If you write some high-level jsonnet functions such as addDashboard(prometheusQuery, yellowThreshold, redThreshold) (pseudocode), you can even abstract Grafana-specific stuff to some extent and later port more easily once the company switches to another observability provider or cloud product. Just like software, dashboards can become buggy and not show you the right things, for example if someone renames a metric! This got me pretty far. Simplest case when the dashboard is a static template you dont have to bother with positioning, only data manipulations is enough. This must be visible in visualizations and alert messages. It is a Kubernetes-native solution built by the Grafana community. I am going to talk about Data representation. . A Grafana dashboard contains panels and rows. Grizzly currently doesnt support Grafana OnCall and Grafana Alerting resources. Set the category and title of each dashboard so that non-production ones show a clear hint. Exporting a visually-crafted dashboard to JSON is unfortunately not a solution, since that diminishes many of the advantages explained in this article (such as consistency). The [2m] in there should be selected depending on how stable the metric is and how fast you need to react once the metric reaches a threshold (mind the averaging!). Sorry, an error occurred. At Weave, we have Grafana dashboards for all of our microservices. Thanks, You also need to know which thresholds are bad, or configure horizontal lines on the graph which represent warning and errors thresholds. For some of these, you may be able to leverage variables (mind Avoid dropdowns for variable values), while some value ranges may simply be too largefor instance if you have a million customersand you should rather show the top N problematic ones (Show only offenders or top N problematic items). *You can see a picture of the code tree in appendix D. Grafana has multiple aspects to be automated. We can expect tooling to try and combine them in the future, such as "metrics from logs" features. Filling the templates with replacements and deploying to different Grafanas. The Crossplane provider is dependent on having the Crossplane CLI and Crossplane installed in the Kubernetes cluster. 3) Update the template in code base (git). Grafonnet-Lib from Grafana: https://github.com/grafana/grafonnet-lib and then Save to file. Grafanalib at least has a pre-packaged docker example in https://github.com/weaveworks/grafanalib/issues/57. Aggregations such as Mean may be a useless "all problems averaged away" view if you pick a big time range such as Last 24 hours, and would therefore show different values to different people. The current jsonnet+Grafonnet solution for generated dashboards is not the final stage of evolution. Custom Grafana alert viewer/dashboard - Stack Overflow Make sure you use the rate function inside histogram_quantile. It uses jsonnet and grafonnet to generate dashboards completely via code. Panels single target context. As of writing, the Grafana Ansible collection only works for Grafana Cloud and only supports eight resources: API keys, cloud stacks, plugins, dashboards, folders, data sources, alert contact points, and notification policies. importance="boss_says_this_is_super_critical"; or name them "Tier1", "Tier2", etc.). GitHub - temporalio/dashboards: Temporal Dashboards If grafanalib didnt have the momentum that it does, I would seriously look into switching. Configure Grafana to pick up files from that directory. When we want to understand our system, our Grafana dashboards are the first things we look at. I have not used this feature yet and typically rather repeat the links on each panel since that does not require scrolling all the way to the top. Next, store the following script as watch.sh: Run the script, passing the source files as argument. Start with values that work, and adjust them if you later see false positives (red when system is fine) or false negatives (green when system has problems). Most importantly, you as author should be part of the audience yourself, or else you are not a good fit to develop a reasonable dashboard. That said, I dont have a great deal of time to maintain it. Show the top 10 highest error rates (Prometheus: topk). Typically however, such as for error rate metrics, you want the top values shown first, since the bottom of the tooltip may be cut off in case of many entries. If any changes are made directly in the UI, the changes will be discarded when the provider resyncs. To set specific thresholds per value combination (here: "payment method / error type"), adjust Max: Since Grafana live-previews your changes, it should be simple to choose good values for Max. (!) And the Grafana Dashboards are a very important part of infrastructure and application instrumentation. What are the specific ways in which grafanalib doesnt meet your needs? How? Code review for dashboards, and reviewers who are application experts (who understand the meaning of the displayed metrics), are essential to keep up good quality and really make the dashboards plain simple to use without explanations. Since the Last setting does not average at all, your query should do that instead of sampling a single raw value: Prometheus queries such as increment(the_metric[2m]), or rate(the_metric[2m]) if you prefer a consistent unit to work with, will average for you. For medium to large companies in terms of head count, introducing such a consistent concept will be impossible unless technical leadership supports the full switch from the old or non-existing monitoring solution to Grafana with dashboards-as-code. Save the script as render-and-configmap.sh. In our payment example, we could alternatively show the payment methods with the highest rate of errors. Grafana and its competitors offer quite interesting features such as anomaly detection (Datadog) (also possible with Prometheusinteresting blog post), error/crash tracking (Sentry) and others. *" so that queries become less verbose: sum by (payment_method, error_type) (rate(payment_errors_total{$datacenter}[2m])). The 3 current pillars of observabilitymetrics, logs and tracesmay not remain considered the best solution forever. Auto-positioning on/off flag (more about it in Appendix B). In our cluster, we run gfdatasource as a sidecar in our grafana pods, but you dont have to do it like that. We very much enjoy using it here at Weaveworks, and weve already merged many patches from external contributors to support cases that dont matter very much to us here. Grizzly supports moving dashboards within Grafana instances and also retrieves information about already provisioned Grafana resources. I would love to see the thresholds feature for the heatmap visualization as well, so that good values can be colored green, and bad ones yellow or red. 24. Those solutions provide a very good backup solution as well. Admittedly, that will not cover if the internet, a customer, or our API are down, because payment requests would not even reach the system and therefore cannot produce logs or error metrics. This dependency can be unattractive for non-Crossplane users. jb (jsonnet-bundler) will be used as jsonnet package manager, and go-jsonnet (not the much slower C++ implementation!) To manage Grafana dashboards in a declarative way, we need to: Create a (Kubernetes . You may also have the rare case of "too high and too low are both bad" metrics, e.g. Cardinalitythe counter has these labels: payment_method (example values credit_card, voucher, bank_transfer), error_type (example values connectivity_through_internet, remote_service_down, local_configuration_error). An example high-level dashboard of mine takes 115 kiB when Base64-encoded, so you also will not be able to say "we can fix this problem later", since you will reach the limit very soon. In contrast, a gauge can take an arbitrary value. That script uses your API key to overwrite dashboards in your Grafana instance. Grafana dashboards are provided in json format. Some of the tools we are covering in this guide include Grafana Terraform provider, Grafana Ansible collection, Grafonnet for dashboards, Grizzly, Grafana APIs with GitHub Actions, and Crossplane. Build a dashboard generator around your specific needs. As of 2022-04, you cannot easily align visualizations using jsonnet. The grid position must be specified explicitly: See Panel size and position documentationwidth is split in 24 columns, height is 30 pixels each. Grafana Dashboards-as-Code For Newcomers This article shows how to set up a Grafana dashboard to monitor Azure Databricks jobs for performance issues. You can still repeat your visualizations for each cluster, or query for by (cluster) if it proves helpfulbut probably rather on low-level dashboards. However, Im currently stuck on rendering the various panels and auto generate all the IDs. In the end, you may find that one of your cloud availability zones A/B/C, in which the software runs, does not have internet access. Grafana Tutorial: Automating Common Grafana Actions Nov 05, 2020 14 min read Giedrius Statkevicius Table of Contents Intro to Terraform Grafana provider Examples Folders Data sources Dashboards Alert notification channels Organizations Notes Automating Actions With Go Barebones Program Testing Your Automation Prometheus recording rules/alerts in Grafana Cloud. With awesome UI it makes tasks a lot easier. Follow the jsonnet tutorial to learn more how to achieve that. You do not want to be looking at a development dashboard while debugging a production issue, so make that mistake impossible to happen. The downside is that in healthy cases, nothing gets shown, making users unaware of how it should normally look like. Dashboards. Anything else is not as important, and therefore not worth to observe as the first thing. A Dashboard can have templates added to it. Ive been working hard on a solution to programmatically provision Grafana dashboards. Employees usually do not open the user settings page, for example to choose light/dark mode or their timezone preference, resulting in inconsistent customer and incident communication regarding dates and times. The Prometheus naming practices page gives very good guidance, such as to use lower_snake_case, name counters xxx_total or specify the unit such as xxx_seconds. Grafana users, who already thought of the goodies in managing it as a code but not yet have the comprehensive solution in the had. Monitoring is a critical component of operating Azure Databricks workloads in . Resources for configuration management are available for Grafana through the Ansible collection for Grafana. The scope could be one system, service, product domain, or for small companies even the whole landscape at once. Meaningful dashboards also ease the path to setting correct alerts that do not wake you up unnecessarily. addPanels is a function of the grafana.dashboard object, which will allow us to add an array of panels to be shown on the dashboard. Consider also "value under threshold" checks, since an error rate of zero could simply come from zero requests per second, and that can mean a whole service or feature is not working, or customers cannot reach your API. The Grafonnet library is the official way to develop dashboards using the Jsonnet language. It is key to document and communicate that codifying dashboards is the only way to go, listing the rationale for your company and also how a developer can start creating or modifying dashboards. Are people interested in trying to work in that direction? If you do that, you will end up with 100 dashboards, each for a single, distinct purpose, such as one per microservice. Those other concepts are out of scope in this article. First, the necessary tools. Usually we add Grafana dashboards using the UI. Please also read Keep panels small on screen above. Adding our custom dashboard Now we can add our own custom configmap Helm template to the dashboards folder. removed from the queue, or added. Grizzly is a command line tool that allows you to manage your observability resources with code. Refer to the documentation section in the grafana-operator repository to get started. You must remember what Dev in DevOps stands for! The article is all about live monitoring of a service/system which could have incidents at any time. A Grafana dashboard provides a way of displaying metrics and log data in the form of visualisations and reporting dashboards. Product-unrelated dashboards, such as monitoring for Kubernetes clusters or infrastructure, can go into a separate category. The Four Golden Signals of Googles SRE book additionally distinguishes traffic from saturation. Do not confuse the tooltip with the legend (which also has a configurable sort order!). The easiest way is to duplicate one of the existing yaml files in that folder, rename it to the name of your dashboard and add the json to it. Prometheus allows the time distinction with and/unless hour() >=6 <21. If you have microservices of the same type, as in this example one service per payment method, the metrics really mean the same thing. You can hardcode x/y absolute values to your liking, but that is a hassle since you do not want to develop a user interface in an absolute grid, right? Therefore, I recommend you present the dashboards on screen during incidents, so that other users see the capabilities they offer, and less obvious features such as the hyperlinks that can be added to the clickable top-left corner of each visualization. First, theyll show a new dashboard schema for Grafana dashboards that removes the reverse engineering that had been previously required. Visualisation- hierarchy, grouping, sizing, positioning and colouring. I started with grafonnet at first but it seems Grafana is being developed quicker then the lib. It can be used to manage a variety of resources, including folders, cloud stacks, and dashboards. In Grafana, the dashboard title is always displayed, even for such single-visualization URLs. Open your Grafana instance and find the dashboard by its title. As a result, red background colorwhich shouts "something is seriously wrong"would be shown above Max * 66% = 103 errors in 2 minutes. If you use Prometheus, then you probably use Grafana. sorted by {{customer_name}}. I did not take any ideas from that talk, as I had watched it only later, so it is a very interesting addition. With file watching tools and a Grafana API key, you can deploy each saved change within a second and only need to reload in your browser. Grafana as code. At Tarantool, we faced the task of | by - Medium Downloads. Unit testing- structure validations, data correctness. And that only by getting alerted about the most important business symptom, not because you had put large effort into monitoring internet connectivity from those availability zones. The Crossplane provider ensures that whatever is defined in the custom resource definitions is what is visible in Grafana UI. The following instructions show you how to do this on a self-hosted Kubernetes setup of Grafana (see their setup instructions). Topics tagged dashboards-as-code Grafana Dashboards-as-Code For Newcomers templating jeremyeder February 8, 2018, 1:29pm 1 Hi - we're trying to formalize our usage of Grafana, and one of the initial hurdles we see is how to allow dashboards to be easily edited by non-Grafana experts, and managed in source control.

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