Grafana basics

- [Instructor] In this video we will cover some of the basic concepts in Grafana. Grafana is an open-source data visualization tool that can consume time-series metric data. We will cover topics such as data sources, query editors, panels, rows, and dashboards. Grafana supports many time-series data storage backends which Grafana labels, data sources. Each data source must be configured in the data source's menu of Grafana and once configured, enables you to graph metric data via an associated query editor. Grafana officially supports the Graphite, InfluxDB, OpenTSDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and AWS CloudWatch data sources, as of the recording of this video. Query editors help query data sources and are customized to implement the specific features and capabilities provided by the data source. Accordingly, you can use a query editor to build one or more queries in your time-series database. You can include variables in your queries which provide a powerful way to explore data dynamically. Also, you can use the query editor to reference one query from another, making it easy to build compound queries. Query editors are used on what Grafana refers to as a panel. A panel is the basic visualization building block in Grafana and allows you to visualize the metric data returned by a query to a backend data source. There are seven panel types. The graph, the singlestat, the dashboard list, the alert list, the heatmap, the table, as well as a text block. We'll explore these types more deeply in coming videos. Grafana makes it very easy to create, edit, copy, remove, and share panels. Groups of panels are logically divided by rows. Rows are a set width which automatically scales based on your browser. It is possible to collapse a row to temporarily hide its contents. In Grafana, the dashboard is where it all comes together. A dashboard can be thought of as a set of one or more panels organized into one or more rows. Dashboards contain a time picker feature which allows you to change the time period for which you see a certain set of metrics. Dashboards can also be named, tagged, and shared making it easy to find the dashboards you are looking for. Common uses of dashboards include creating a set of graphs that measure the performance of a particular part of a system or contain tables that show a list of the most commonly encountered parts or aspects of a system. A great website for exploring the various ways Grafana dashboards can be used is play.grafana.org. This website contains a plethora of useful examples showing how Grafana could be used to display anything from business metrics, such as signups, logins, and payments completed to system metrics, such as CPU, memory usage, and load over time. For example, the following dashboard shows both business metrics, for example, support calls and logins, as well as, system metrics like memory and CPU usage and requests, as well as, application metrics that could be tied to service level agreements such as the time it takes to load a page on a website. This dashboard shows that we can change the time range on a dashboard and if we click on an individual graph and select the edit option the query editor appears. We can use this to edit the graph freely. Now that we have covered some of Grafana's key concepts we can install Grafana and start using it.