Displaying monitoring information

Now that you are collecting your data and writing it into storage, you can start to display it to users. Many of the previously mentioned monitoring tools provide their own visualization systems. Others recommend that you bring your own. One popular open-source tool for this is Grafana.

Whatever you use to visualize and access your metrics, there are four categories of tools that people often use to get and share their data:

• Arbitrary queries

• Graphs

• Dashboards

• Chatbots

Let us talk about why each is useful and things to keep in mind for each of these features.

Arbitrary queries

Everyone needs the ability to create a query of the metrics and logs you are building. The reason is pretty straightforward—metrics are useless if people cannot access them. While you can build people graphs and dashboards, while people are working, they will often have new and exciting questions, which they will need to write new queries against the metric datastore to get answers to. You...