Two main problems I faced with grafana:
- Do you plan on allowing alerts on metrics with variables? This very important for a lot of people. For example, you usually have an environment in the metric name and thus we can't share dashboard between environments if we want to keep metrics.
- When do you plan to fully support CSP? I guess you have to remove the angular code for that, is there a timeline?
Yes! Loads of idea floating around and I think Jon has been working on some improvements for 6.6. Its going to be a big project in 2020 for sure.
(Its something I'm really keen on myself - We use jsonnet internally to version control our dashboards and load them into config maps in our kubernetes clusters)
That's really interesting, would you be keen on open sourcing that bit if you've not already? I know Raj and the rest of the crew are pretty all in on open source.
+1 for using jsonnet. An adequate language for this kind of task! (Here "adequate" is meant as high praise... too often the choice of config langauge isn't.)
Longtime Grafana + InfluxDB user here. Recently I've been using Prometheus as an additional Grafana data source and I was surprised to lose the graphical query editor that I had with InfluxDB. Is graphical query builder support for Prometheus data sources something that's possible or on the roadmap? I searched the docs and Github issues but couldn't find any mention of it.
Director of UX here. We’re trying to find a way to have a graphical builder for simple queries. But anything with binary operators is a UI challenge that will be text based for a while. We’re testing the waters with a graphical LogQL builder for Loki first. Watch this space.
Will you keep making it easy to self-host the services?
We currently use Grafana Loki + Grafana and it's working amazingly well, we've tested load over 600 logs/second (1 Core VPS 2GB RAM) without any issues.
I got it wrong with Cortex (scalable Prometheus) and have been paying the price - poor adoption, smaller community and less mindshare. We're 100% committed to making sure Loki and Grafana are super easy to self-host, and are even putting time and effort into making Cortex and Metrictank easier too.
Thats a very good question! The opensource Loki project will always be fully featured, but we are looking at building an enterprise version in a very similar way to Grafana Enterprise.
Having the right differentiation is key here, and something we're super sensitive to - for instance, we put LDAP (a typically enterprise feature) into OSS Grafana. What this space and let us know what you think!
I've implemented Grafana at many different jobs and in many cases have had an executive who would have been willing to pay for the featureset we got for free.
My two cents:
- Deliver a version of Grafana that is available packaged as an appliance, with very little need to edit the INI files. Click to deploy from the Amazon marketplace with the enterprise license included. Easy guide to getting it running with the IAM roles needed to be a first class Cloudwatch adjunct.
- Build on your current SSO offerings and get support for SAML into the mix, as it's what most companies have settled on for access control.
- Keep working on the dashboard provisioning tech and maybe even provide a templating mechanism accessible from the UI that spits out new dashboards on demand, beyond the (excellent) variable functionality that's currently there.
- More work on alerting! You're so close to a first-class alerting system, but we need template variables in alert text and subject lines, support for alerts on dashboards with template variables, severity levels, and a better UX for configuring alarm conditions. Another feature I'd push hard for any company to pay for an Enterprise license to get would be any kind of adaptive, trend-based thresholds rather than the fixed min/max you currently have. It's about the only reason I'd still push some folks towards Datadog and they rake the money in hand-over-fist.
Thanks so much for your product, it really is an absolute gem. Hope I can get an employer to start paying for it one of these years.
We know that there are some gaps in the alerting feature (we dogfood it ourselves). The Grafana team will be focusing a lot more on alerting in 2020. For Grafana 7.0 in May, we are aiming to build better alerting that retains the simplicity of the current alerting but that will fill some of the those gaps. The new engine will decouple alerting from the graph panel and hopefully sidestep the problem with template variables. Once we have got further in the design stage then we will share more with the community about the proposed solutions.
Seconded! In the current world where dashboards are coupled to alerts, it's very frustrating not to be able to define alerts on a templated dashboard.
It's also frustrating that it's effectively impossible with the Cloudwatch data source to select resources to alert on using their tags (e.g. select the elb with app=foo and env=prod). The dimension_values() function lets you filter based on tags, but instead of being usable directly in a panel's query it requires using a variable as an intermediary, which then disables alerting.
So would I! It is something we're going start work on pretty soon I think - I mainly work on Prometheus, Loki, Cortex etc and not so much on Grafana. Will let one of the Grafana team comment.
Director of UX here. What's your mobile vs desktop use? Which devices are you using?
That will help us getting more mobile-friendly in upcoming releases.
Are you planning to continue focusing on the core product (Grafana) or also branching out into other areas of the observability stack? (tsdb, log store etc)
>50% of out engineering effort goes into Grafana - but we've already branched out into other spaces, with a team working on Metrictank (scalable Graphite), Cortex (scalable Prometheus), Loki (log aggregation) and even the Graphite and Prometheus projects.
That being said, Grafana will always treat other datasources as first class citizens, like we already do with Influx, MySQL, CloudWatch, Stackdriver, Elastic etc. This is our "un-vendor" approach.
Thank you! I can't claim any credit for the Grafana project though - Torkel & team have done and continue to do an excellent job there. I mostly work on Prometheus, Cortex & Loki.
We want to use Jaeger as a datasource and show traces in Grafana - its all a bit early right now, but come see us at KubeCon and we'll have something to show!
