Creating microservice dashboards

In the previous two chapters, we reviewed various ways of working with service metrics. In Chapter 11, we demonstrated how to collect the service metrics, while in Chapter 12, we showed you how to aggregate and query them using the Prometheus tool. In this section, we will describe one more way of accessing the metrics data that can help you explore your metrics and plot them as charts. The technique that we will cover is called dashboarding and is useful for visualizing various service metrics.

Let’s provide an example of a dashboard – a set of charts representing different metrics. The following figure shows the dashboard of a Go service containing some system-level metrics, such as the goroutine count, the number of Go threads, and allocated memory size:

Figure 13.3 – Go process dashboard example from the Grafana tool

Dashboards help visualize various types of data, such as time series datasets, allowing...