The list of reasons to adopt Grafana dashboards is long.
Among other things, Grafana dashboards are excellent tools for gaining insight into time-series data. In addition, Grafana readily integrates with InfluxDB and Telegraf to make monitoring of sensor, system and network metrics much easier and far more insightful.
How to Get Started Using CrateDB and Grafana to Visualize Time-Series Data
Grafana, the open platform for time-series data visualization and monitoring that is quite useful for time-series analytics, makes a pretty compelling team when paired with CrateDB, the open-source distributed SQL database that simplifies the real-time storage and analysis of massive quantities of machine data.
Getting started using Grafana and CrateDB together is a relatively simple process, which this article will walk you through (these instructions pertain to macOS, but can be adapted for other platforms quite easily).
Monitoring Docker Swarm
In one of my last blog posts, I explained how you can set up a lightweight Docker Swarm environment. The concept, which is already an open-infrastructure project on GitHub, enables you to run your business applications and microservices in a self-hosted platform.
Today, I want to explain how you can monitor your Docker Swarm environment. Although Docker Swarm greatly simplifies the operation of business applications, monitoring is always a good idea. The following short tutorial shows how you can use Prometheus and Grafana to simplify monitoring.
Grafana Cloud Dropwizard Metrics Reporter
Time series metrics reporting and alerting is an essential tool when it comes to monitoring production services. Graphs help you monitor trends over time, identify spikes in load/latency, identify bottlenecks with constrained resources, etc. Dropwizard Metrics is a great library for collecting metrics and has a lot of features out of the box including various JVM metrics. There are also many third-party library hooks for collections metrics on HikariCP connections pools, Redis client connections, HTTP client connections, and many more.
Once metrics are being collected we need a time series data store as well as a graphing and alerting system to get the most out of our metrics. This example will be utilizing Grafana Cloud which offers cloud-hosted Grafana, a graphing and alerting application that hooks into many data sources, as well as two options for time series data sources Graphite and Prometheus. StubbornJava has public facing Grafana dashboards that will continue to add new metrics as new content is added. Take a look at the StubbornJava Overview dashboard to start with.