Grafana Guidelines for Alliance Business Suite Engineering

Overview

Grafana is a leading open-source platform for monitoring and observability. At the Alliance Business Suite (ABS), we use Grafana to visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple data sources. This guide outlines how to effectively use Grafana within our development ecosystem.

Table of Contents

Getting Started

Installation

For local development, you can download Grafana and follow the installation instructions for your operating system.

Accessing Grafana in ABS Environment

  • Navigate to the Grafana instance configured within our ABS environment (link to be provided by the system admin).

Logging In

  • Use your ABS credentials to sign in.

Dashboard Configuration

Dashboards are collections of visualizations, panels, and data points that provide a unified view of different metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Creating a Dashboard

  1. Click on the + icon in the sidebar and select Create Dashboard.
  2. Add panels and select the data source you'd like to visualize.

Best Practices

  • Give your dashboard a meaningful name.
  • Use folders to organize dashboards by team or project.

Data Sources

Grafana supports various data sources like MySQL, MSSQL, PGSQL, ORACLE, MongoDB, etc. As ABS contains drivers for these databases, it simplifies the integration.

Adding a Data Source

  1. Go to Settings > Data Sources.
  2. Click Add data source and select from the available options.

Panels

Panels are the building blocks of Grafana and can be of different types: graphs, tables, maps, clocks, etc.

Creating a Panel

  1. Go to the dashboard where you want to add the panel.
  2. Click Add Panel and choose the visualization type.
  3. Configure the panel's query to fetch the data from your chosen data source.

Alerting

Grafana alerts notify you when specific conditions are met. Alerts can be sent to email, Slack, and other notification channels.

Creating an Alert

  1. Go to the panel you want to create an alert for.
  2. Click on the Alert tab.
  3. Set the conditions and configure your notification settings.

Best Practices

  • Ensure that only relevant team members have access to sensitive or critical data.
  • Regularly update Grafana to the latest version to benefit from new features and security patches.
  • Make use of template variables for creating dynamic and reusable dashboards.

Additional Resources

For any questions, concerns, or contributions, you can reach out to the Engineering Team on the Engineering Team's Teams Channel.