Open Source Friday with Grafana Labs!
26 Aug 2024 (5 months ago)
Grafana and its Open-Source Nature
- Kyle Cunningham is a Senior Engineer at Grafana Labs, the company that builds the open-source observability platform Grafana. (7m6s)
- Grafana was created approximately 10 years prior to the video by founder Torkel Ödegaard and has been open source since its inception. (7m30s)
- Grafana Labs has always been an open-source organization. (7m30s)
- Grafana Labs, with approximately 1,500 employees, primarily focuses on open source code development, with roughly half of the workforce comprising engineers (around 700-800). (7m50s)
- Grafana is very open to contributions and encourages people to check out their issues on GitHub, especially those tagged with "good first issue". (40m28s)
- Grafana has received contributions from many individuals and organizations, not just Grafana Labs. (41m20s)
Grafana's Capabilities and Features
- Grafana, an observability platform, enables users to connect to and visualize various data sources, facilitating data correlation, monitoring, and analysis across diverse applications, from infrastructure and aerospace to bird watching. (8m42s)
- Beyond its core features, Grafana offers lesser-known functionalities, including built-in incident response tools with Slack integration and robust data transformation capabilities for in-depth analysis and modeling. (10m21s)
- Grafana has a feature called annotation queries that allows users to overlay annotations from different data sources on top of time-series data, such as CPU usage, to correlate events and understand the impact of code deployments. (42m21s)
- Grafana can integrate with various tools, including those not related to monitoring, such as DataDog. (48m43s)
- Grafana can be gradually adopted, allowing users to start with individual components or utilize the entire stack for logging, traces, metrics, and data visualization. (49m16s)
- Grafana scales to accommodate organizations with varying needs, from those with a few dashboards to those with hundreds of thousands. (50m3s)
Grafana and GitHub Integration
- Grafana dashboards can be used to monitor code and activity on Github. (14m44s)
- Grafana dashboards can display data from Github such as the number of pull requests, reviews, and open pull requests in a given time frame. (15m46s)
- Grafana dashboards can be customized to show data for specific users and timeframes by using variables within the query. (19m22s)
- Grafana dashboards can be used to display data from GitHub using the GitHub GraphQL API. (20m53s)
- The GitHub dashboard configuration is available as a simple-to-add plugin and offers dynamic links to pull requests. (21m20s)
- Grafana dashboards can be used to trigger alerts based on thresholds set on queries, such as the number of open pull requests. (25m10s)
- Grafana Cloud can connect to a repository or organization using a personal access token, and no coding is required. (32m21s)
Using and Learning Grafana
- The speaker changed the query to show closed issues instead of open issues. (27m1s)
- The speaker used a transformation to format the time and group the data by month and year. (29m13s)
- Grafana has in-depth documentation, including videos, to help users learn how to set up and use the platform's features, such as visualizations and transformations. (34m9s)
- Users are encouraged to download Grafana, utilize the GitHub data source, explore their organization's code, and contribute to the open-source ecosystem by starring the Grafana repository, submitting issues, and taking on existing ones. (57m58s)
Grafana's User Base and Data Sources
- Grafana is used by a wide range of individuals, including those in technical roles like SREs and data engineers, as well as those in non-technical roles like business analysts and management. (36m17s)
- Grafana can connect to a variety of data sources, including time series databases like Prometheus and Graphite, SQL databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL, and other sources like GitHub. (38m53s)