Getting Started with Grafana

Begin working with the Grafana data visualization platform. This book is a “how-to manual” for deploying and administering Grafana, creating real-time dashboards and alerts, exploring the data you have, and even synthesizing new data by combining and manipulating data from multiple different sources. You’ll be able to see and manage data on any scale, from your laptop or a Raspberry Pi to a production datacenter or even a multi-region cloud environment!

Getting Started with Grafana takes a hands-on approach. You’ll learn by doing with easy-to-follow examples along with pointers to more resources to help you go deeper. The skills you’ll learn will help you provide business value by monitoring your operations in real time and reacting to changing circumstances as they occur. You’ll be able to derive new insights from your existing data through Grafana’s powerful and beautiful graphing capabilities, and you’ll be able to share your dashboards with colleagues so everyone in your organization can benefit.  

What You Will Learn

• Connect to data “where it lives” and work with multiple sources of data
• Build beautiful and informative dashboards that show real-time status
• Deploy Grafana at any scale and manage it efficiently
• Integrate with other enterprise systems such as LDAP or Active Directory
• Automate creation and deployment of Grafana, dashboards, and alerts
• Understand what is available in the Enterprise version of Grafana

Who This Book Is For

Anyone who has data that they want to understand visually, IT professionals who work with multiple sources of data on a regular basis and need to make sense of the confusion that this data sprawl causes, and people who learn best by doing and want to get hands-on experience quickly with a project and then grow their knowledge

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Grafana Cloud

Chapter 2: Working with Panels

Chapter 3: Deploying Grafana Locally

Chapter 4: Connecting to Data Sources

Chapter 5: User Administration

Chapter 6: Dashboard Design

Chapter 7: Workflow

Chapter 8: Working with Multiple Data Sources

Chapter 9: Advanced Panels

Chapter 10: Dashboard Variables

Chapter 11: Alerting

Chapter 12: Advanced Deployment and Management

Chapter 13: Programmatic Grafana

Chapter 14: Grafana Enterprise

About the Author

Ronald McCollam is a “geek of all trades” with experience ranging from full stack development to IT operations management. He has a strong background in open source software dating back to when a stack of 3.5” Slackware floppies was the easy way to install Linux. When not on the road for work or in his lab building robots that can operate a Ouija board, Ronald resides on his back porch in Somerville, MA with a frosty beverage in hand.