Open Source Friday with Grafana Labs!

26 Aug 2024 (21 days 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.
Grafana was created approximately 10 years prior to the video by founder Torkel Ödegaard and has been open source since its inception.
Grafana Labs has always been an open-source organization.
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).
Grafana is very open to contributions and encourages people to check out their issues on GitHub, especially those tagged with "good first issue".
Grafana has received contributions from many individuals and organizations, not just Grafana Labs.

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.
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.
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.
Grafana can integrate with various tools, including those not related to monitoring, such as DataDog.
Grafana can be gradually adopted, allowing users to start with individual components or utilize the entire stack for logging, traces, metrics, and data visualization.
Grafana scales to accommodate organizations with varying needs, from those with a few dashboards to those with hundreds of thousands.

Grafana dashboards can be used to monitor code and activity on Github.
Grafana dashboards can display data from Github such as the number of pull requests, reviews, and open pull requests in a given time frame.
Grafana dashboards can be customized to show data for specific users and timeframes by using variables within the query.
Grafana dashboards can be used to display data from GitHub using the GitHub GraphQL API.
The GitHub dashboard configuration is available as a simple-to-add plugin and offers dynamic links to pull requests.
Grafana dashboards can be used to trigger alerts based on thresholds set on queries, such as the number of open pull requests.
Grafana Cloud can connect to a repository or organization using a personal access token, and no coding is required.

The speaker changed the query to show closed issues instead of open issues.
The speaker used a transformation to format the time and group the data by month and year.
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.
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.

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.
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.

Tempo was used with Drone to set up this CI/CD visualization.
Setting up the CI/CD visualization is straightforward and involves adding correlations, selecting IDs, using variables, choosing a data source, searching tags, and saving the correlation.