Tried Grafana briefly a year or two ago, and I wanted to like it, but similar to Kibana, it's laser-focused on the task of realtime monitoring current data. I wanted to use it for a high-level view of historical stuff (robot data recordings from ROS), and there was a lot of really basic functionality for that use case that just wasn't there at all.
Even stuff as basic as being able to pan a plot back and forth after you've zoomed in— here's the four year old ticket for that in their issue tracker: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1387
I ended up generating Bokeh plots and had a much better time. So Grafana is great for what it's great at, but I don't recommend it for uses other than current-moment data.
It's solely focused on data analysis (none of this "dashboard" stuff), but I've found Kst[0] to be the lowest-friction way of going from plaintext time-series data to fancy, zoomable, draggable plots in whatever layout you want. It handles realtime data very handily as well, happily scaling with as much backlog as I could throw at it.
Bokeh is a nice kit as far as it goes, but I hit scaling problems quite early with it - as I understood it, it was supposed to send incremental updates to the client, but in fact it resent everything every time - and therefore fell over after half an hour when the time to update exceeded the update rate. Maybe I was holding it wrong.
thanks for the feedback. there's definitely a lot of validity to what you're saying, for what you describe.
grafana has traditionally been used for 'real time dashboarding and analytics' in the IT/devops world. that's the original use case, and its sweet spot, as you allude to.
but, since the beginning, the mission of the open source grafana project has had nothing to do with IT per se. it was about democratizing metrics; helping teams understand their 'systems', by breaking down silos between databases and people.
over the last few years, interesting things are afoot in grafana community. we're seeing grafana used for more and more non-IT use cases. it's being deployed in the industrial and business worlds. about 10-20% of the grafana community now deal with things that have nothing to do with IT/devops.
the 'systems' are no longer limited to things like servers, switches, containers and clusters. these emerging users deal with things like temperature sensors, dollars, robots and ambulances. we are making progress in bringing grafana to these worlds, while also ideally improving it overall.
there's tangential threads in various stages of recent completeness (none of which solve your specific issue admittedly). things like sql support, general focus on ad-hoc analysis with ('explore'), the upcoming abstraction around being able to better use ui components within grafana ('grafana/ui'), improved support for tabular data, new panels, etc.
sorry about the four year old issue; i'd be lying if i said there weren't myriad things we'd like to do, that don't make the cut not due to desire but due to time and resources.
again, thanks for the feedback, please know that we're very interested in continuing to develop and improve grafana for use cases like yours!
-r
[disclosure, very biased and opinionated response. am co-founder/ceo at grafana labs. lucky enough to work with torkel and the team on making grafana better]
I had the same problem. I also want simple binary metrics and batch related updates like are batch jobs running on time or over due. I really want to avoid writing my own dashboard but seems the only way.
I use it for my Pi based solar production and house monitoring and like it. It was the first time i've ever used it. I found it fit perfect for this project. I was surprised when I tried to use it for literally anything other than raw linear data input it was completely useless. Neat product, but not sure why it gets so much attention given how it really one does one very very specific task... I guess it looks neat...
I had a similar problem. I think Grafana or Chronograf still has its place, but based on what you've said I'll try replacing some of our dashboards with a Bokeh generated dashboard. The library looks very powerful. What is the best practice of updating the plots (e.g. once a minute)?
A fun little thing to do if you want to play around with the new release: install prometheus, prometheus node_exporter, grafana, and grab the node_exporter full dashboard from the grafana site. In like 10 minutes you've got a pretty cool system info dashboard for your laptop :).
If your dashboards have so many panels that lazy loading is important, you need to reconsider your dashboard design. Endlessly scrolling to find the panel you're interested in makes for a painful user experience, and it makes it harder to compare series across panels.
I aim to keep dashboards no larger than what can be displayed in a single window on a desktop, with perhaps some supplementary plots below, often in a collapsed row. I make heavy use of "drill-down" links, preferably from tables or single-stats (or more often the "status panel" for denser displays [1]), or in panel notes otherwise, to dive further into the data.
When designing a dashboard, I ask myself "what story is this dashboard going to tell?", and as with a good novel I try to keep from straying too far from that narrative, branching side-plots out into new dashboards as needed.
Same here, we just deployed a test instance running the upgraded code. No issues in our existing dashboards so far, and our initial testers are liking the speed improvements a lot.
I have been having some fun recently with Grafana session storage. In the end it seemed like a database issue which was unavoidable because there aren't other options for session storage when you use a db (other than downgrading to 5.x)
After endless grinding with configuration options, debugging go code (new skill) and javascript running in the browser I tried switching out to a local mariadb and it worked instantly. Lesson learned, be wary of a Galera mysql cluster. My running but unproved theory that during the login process the creation of the user token in the db and reading it back happen so quickly that the item isn't available yet so Grafana can't find it and logs the user out.
If I have a CSV of a number of values (say in the thousands), and what I need is basically a tool that will create a slick, good-looking graph that compares two or more of these CSVs, what's the best tool for that? Think JMeter if that rings any bells.
I honestly just used some basic graph-generation tools which would spit out PNGs, which is always less than satisfying. I looked at Grafana, but never had the time to actually try it out. My feeling also was that it was a bit different of a use-case as I had no real-time data, but I may be totally wrong here.
Great job. Though I am still waiting for official CSP support, it seems like it should already be there. Unfortunately the legacy angular code prevents us from applying any real policy.
[+] [-] mikepurvis|6 years ago|reply
Even stuff as basic as being able to pan a plot back and forth after you've zoomed in— here's the four year old ticket for that in their issue tracker: https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/1387
I ended up generating Bokeh plots and had a much better time. So Grafana is great for what it's great at, but I don't recommend it for uses other than current-moment data.
[+] [-] dTal|6 years ago|reply
Bokeh is a nice kit as far as it goes, but I hit scaling problems quite early with it - as I understood it, it was supposed to send incremental updates to the client, but in fact it resent everything every time - and therefore fell over after half an hour when the time to update exceeded the update rate. Maybe I was holding it wrong.
[0] https://kst-plot.kde.org/
[+] [-] nopzor|6 years ago|reply
grafana has traditionally been used for 'real time dashboarding and analytics' in the IT/devops world. that's the original use case, and its sweet spot, as you allude to.
but, since the beginning, the mission of the open source grafana project has had nothing to do with IT per se. it was about democratizing metrics; helping teams understand their 'systems', by breaking down silos between databases and people.
over the last few years, interesting things are afoot in grafana community. we're seeing grafana used for more and more non-IT use cases. it's being deployed in the industrial and business worlds. about 10-20% of the grafana community now deal with things that have nothing to do with IT/devops.
the 'systems' are no longer limited to things like servers, switches, containers and clusters. these emerging users deal with things like temperature sensors, dollars, robots and ambulances. we are making progress in bringing grafana to these worlds, while also ideally improving it overall.
there's tangential threads in various stages of recent completeness (none of which solve your specific issue admittedly). things like sql support, general focus on ad-hoc analysis with ('explore'), the upcoming abstraction around being able to better use ui components within grafana ('grafana/ui'), improved support for tabular data, new panels, etc.
sorry about the four year old issue; i'd be lying if i said there weren't myriad things we'd like to do, that don't make the cut not due to desire but due to time and resources.
again, thanks for the feedback, please know that we're very interested in continuing to develop and improve grafana for use cases like yours!
-r
[disclosure, very biased and opinionated response. am co-founder/ceo at grafana labs. lucky enough to work with torkel and the team on making grafana better]
[+] [-] rb808|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xmichael999|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lykr0n|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markbnj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] latchkey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbarbugli|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] retzkek|6 years ago|reply
I aim to keep dashboards no larger than what can be displayed in a single window on a desktop, with perhaps some supplementary plots below, often in a collapsed row. I make heavy use of "drill-down" links, preferably from tables or single-stats (or more often the "status panel" for denser displays [1]), or in panel notes otherwise, to dive further into the data.
When designing a dashboard, I ask myself "what story is this dashboard going to tell?", and as with a good novel I try to keep from straying too far from that narrative, branching side-plots out into new dashboards as needed.
[1] https://grafana.com/plugins/vonage-status-panel
[+] [-] mkching|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NickBusey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|6 years ago|reply
After endless grinding with configuration options, debugging go code (new skill) and javascript running in the browser I tried switching out to a local mariadb and it worked instantly. Lesson learned, be wary of a Galera mysql cluster. My running but unproved theory that during the login process the creation of the user token in the db and reading it back happen so quickly that the item isn't available yet so Grafana can't find it and logs the user out.
[+] [-] BossingAround|6 years ago|reply
I honestly just used some basic graph-generation tools which would spit out PNGs, which is always less than satisfying. I looked at Grafana, but never had the time to actually try it out. My feeling also was that it was a bit different of a use-case as I had no real-time data, but I may be totally wrong here.
[+] [-] wielebny|6 years ago|reply
Additionaly, you can see results while JMeter is still running.
[+] [-] dogtail|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netingle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sytten|6 years ago|reply