Preface

Grafana is an open source analytical platform used for analyzing and monitoring time-series data. This second edition will help you to get up to speed with Grafana 10’s latest features for querying, visualizing, and exploring logs and metrics no matter where they are stored. Along the way, we’ll introduce key concepts and best practices in software development, data visualization, and application administration.

The book begins by showing you how to quickly install and set up a Grafana server using Docker. You’ll become familiar with important components of the Grafana interface and learn how to analyze and visualize data from sources including InfluxDB, Telegraf, Prometheus, Logstash, and Elasticsearch.

We will cover many of Grafana’s key panel visualizations, including Time Series, Stat, Table, Bar Gauge, and Text. You’ll use Python to pipeline data, transformations to facilitate analytics, and templates to build dynamic dashboards. You’ll explore real-time data streaming with Telegraf, Promtail, and Loki, as well as observability features such as alerting rules, PagerDuty, and Slack integrations.

As you progress, the book will delve into the administrative aspects of Grafana, from configuring users and organizations to implementing user authentication with Okta and LDAP, organizing dashboards into folders, and more.

By the end of this book, you’ll have gained the knowledge you need to extract, transform, and load data; connect Grafana to time-series databases; build interactive dashboards; and leverage ad hoc data exploration for observability. Whether you are interested in visualization for data science or observability for your operations, this book will provide the launch pad for anyone looking to become proficient using a data visualization and observability application such as Grafana.