Setting up Grafana using Docker

So far in this chapter, we have learned the basics of monitoring. We laid out the foundation of our monitoring system: our metrics. We learned how to create metrics using Dropwizard's Codahale library. We then spun off a brand-new Graphite instance. Later, we exported the metrics that we created over to Graphite. In the rest of the recipes of this chapter, we will be learning more about a tool called Grafana and how it can be used in monitoring our microservices.

Getting ready

Instead of running Grafana on its own using the docker run command, we will be adding it to the docker-compose YAML file that holds Graphite. The reason we are doing this is because they are closely related to each other though they need not be linked. Before we jump in, let's take some time to understand what Grafana is. Grafana is an open source tool for metrics visualization. The Grafana interface is sophisticated enough that it be used to create several types of graphs. Very recently...