Grafana

Grafana is an open source analytics and monitoring tool which can be used to visualise data from Obcerv and create alerts. If you have existing Grafana installs, you can seamlessly integrate data from Obcerv into your current dashboards.

You can also create visualisations using Obcerv Dashboards.

Configure the data source Copied

Once you have logged into Grafana, you must configure the Obcerv data source.

To add a new data source:

1. Go to Administration > Data sources in the Grafana navigation panel.
2. Click Add data source, search for ITRS Group Obcerv and select it.
3. Specify the data source settings. The following settings are available:

   Field	Description
   Name	Specify a display name for the data source.
   Obcerv API	Host and port of the Obcerv REST API, for example, https://local.itrslab.com/api
   Skip tls verification	If you want to skip the TLS verification.

• You can also click on the Default switch on the top of the screen if you want it to appear as default datasource.

4. Click Save & test to save the configuration.

For more information, see the official Grafana doc to add a data source here.

Query the data source Copied

To visualise data from Obcerv, you can create a new panel in a new or existing Grafana dashboard.

1. Open a dashboard or create a new dashboard.
2. Click Add > Visualization.
3. Under Query, set the query to the Obcerv data source using the name you specified above.
4. Specify the query parameters:

   Field	Description
   Alias	Displayed in the legend to identify a time series.
   Filter	Filters will be available for auto-completion when composing a query, they are in the form attribute/dimension=“value”. For example pod=“collection-agent-sx6cv”
   Metric	Name of the metric.
   Group by	Dimensions or attributes to group by the results.
   Buckets	Used to populate the Buckets in BucketRequest.
   Bucket function	Used to populate the Function in BucketRequest.
   Forecast	If enabled, returns the forecast of the selected metric. Please note that it only works if the filter returns only one metric.

To use status metrics, select the metric and select All fields to display non-numeric fields:

Templates and variables Copied

You can define variables in Grafana that allow you to dynamically change the data displayed on your dashboards. You can use the Obcerv data source to populate variables.

To add a new ITRS Group Obcerv query variable:

1. Open the Dashboard settings menu.
2. Click Variables.
3. Click New.
4. Configure the variable using the following options:

   Field	Description
   Name	Variable name, this name will be used in the data source to refer to the variable with the $ symbol in front.
   Label	Label of the text box displayed in the panel.
   Data source	Specify ITRS Group Obcerv.
   Query	Specify the query used to populate the variables list.

5. (optional) You can check multi-value switch if you want to choose more than one value for the variable.
6. To see a preview of the values, click Update.

Grafana query syntax Copied

The syntax for the Query used to get the variable values is json with the form:

Consider as an example:

Variables with filter Copied

Variables can be filtered by another variable, using a dimension or an attribute. The syntax to populate variables with a filter is:

The filter is a list of objects with the fields name and value. The name must be an attribute or dimension name, the value can be a specific value or the name of another variable with the $preffix. For example, if a variable named kubecontainer exists, then the query could be:

This allows variable chaining so the values of some variables can be used to filter other dependent variables.