What is Grafana?

Learn visualization with Grafana.

What is Grafana?

Grafana visualizes metrics from data sources like Prometheus (and Loki, Elasticsearch) in dashboards. kube-prometheus-stack installs Grafana with ready dashboards for the cluster, nodes, pods and namespaces:

kubectl port-forward -n izleme svc/izleme-grafana 3000:80
# browser: http://localhost:3000
kubectl get secret -n izleme izleme-grafana -o jsonpath='{.data.admin-password}' | base64 -d

Dashboards can be exported as JSON and kept under version control with a ConfigMap (a sidecar loads them automatically).

A good dashboard

Service dashboards usually follow the RED method: Rate (request rate), Errors (error rate), Duration (response time). Infrastructure dashboards follow USE: Utilization, Saturation, Errors:

Rate:     sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m]))
Errors:   sum(rate(http_requests_total{status=~"5.."}[5m])) / sum(rate(http_requests_total[5m]))
Duration: histogram_quantile(0.95, sum(rate(http_request_duration_seconds_bucket[5m])) by (le))

Exercise Connect to Grafana

Write two commands: take the admin-password value from the izleme-grafana Secret in izleme with jsonpath and decode it with base64 -d; forward local port 3000 to port 80 of the svc/izleme-grafana service in izleme.

Show example solution

kubectl get secret -n izleme izleme-grafana -o jsonpath='{.data.admin-password}' | base64 -d
kubectl port-forward -n izleme svc/izleme-grafana 3000:80

Test yourself

What is the division of labour between Prometheus and Grafana?
- Prometheus collects and stores; Grafana queries and visualizes
- Grafana collects; Prometheus displays
- Both do the same job
- Grafana collects logs
Show answer

Prometheus collects and stores; Grafana queries and visualizes — Grafana doesn't store metrics by itself.

Open Grafana on local port 3000.

kubectl ____ -n izleme svc/izleme-grafana 3000:80

Show answer

kubectl port-forward -n izleme svc/izleme-grafana 3000:80

Match.

Rate

Request rate
Errors

Error rate
Duration

Response time
USE

Infrastructure method

Next lesson: PromQL basics

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