Over the years I've evaluated multiple other solutions like Grafana but none of them came even near the feature set and simplicity of Grafana.
Awesome work, huge thanks to all contributors.
Grafana 8.0
11–20 of 52 posts
Re: Grafana 8.0
#12I find the new panels really useful, not sure I like the color changes to the navbar and panel backgrounds though.
Do you prefer the more darker grays in v7.x?
Re: Grafana 8.0
#13Re: Grafana 8.0
#14Over the years I've evaluated multiple other solutions like Grafana but none of them came even near the feature set and simplicity of Grafana. Awesome work, huge thanks to all contributors.
In the years before Grafana the situation was not much better either. Graphite's render endpoint was decent and functional, but Grafana was the first that would let you easily make nice looking graphs and dashboard. I remember there was Giraffe[0] which came close and some other alternatives[1], most of them are dead now. I'm really looking forward to using the Library panels, a feature I always found lacking.
I always found it a nice gesture by Raintank that they took in the Graphite project and are maintaining it to this day.
[0] https://github.com/kenhub/giraffe [1] https://graphite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tools.html#visuali...
Re: Grafana 8.0
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Biggest change in the release, IMO: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/alerting/unified-ale...
Does the new alerting engine support template variables in queries [1]? Many complained about this. [1] https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/6557
It does not support template variables because alerts have been moved out of Dashboards so that would not really fit.
However, it does now support queries like `host=*` with multiple alerts instances per host from one rule/query. E.g. https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/7832#issuecomment-...
Re: Grafana 8.0
#16The relatively new Node graph visualization can't be used with any datasource, even if you select the data to fit the model of the two nodes and edges data frames, because it needs a special meta property to work. EDIT: it seems it is no longer the case, I will test it : https://github.com/grafana/grafana/pull/35163/files#diff-148... Also it would be nice if an embedded panel could select its own time range.
Yes that limitation was removed and you should be able to use the node graph in dashboards with any datasource providing you can query the data in the right format. In Explore though such query will still show the data in a table if the meta property isn't present. We hope to improve that later on.
Re: Grafana 8.0
#17in case people want to see Torkel talking Grafana 8 - check it out. go here and hit play, he's on now. https://grafana.com/about/events/grafanacon/2021/
Re: Grafana 8.0
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the new alerting engine support template variables in queries [1]? Many complained about this. [1] https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/6557
It does not support template variables because alerts have been moved out of Dashboards so that would not really fit. However, it does now support queries like `host=*` with multiple alerts instances per host from one rule/query. E.g. https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/7832#issuecomment-...
As Kyle says, we are sidestepping the template variables problem by decoupling alerts from dashboards. You can instead link from an alert to a dashboard or panel (or run book) and get a similar experience to the old alerting.
When you get a notification, you have a link to the appropriate dashboard and it is also easy to create an alert from a query in a dashboard. You can see the linked alert rule in the panel edit mode.
Re: Grafana 8.0
#19I don't understand the duplication of alerting with Grafana/Alertmanager. Is it not better to keep all alert configuration central in prometheus alerting rules ?
Re: Grafana 8.0
#20I don't understand the duplication of alerting with Grafana/Alertmanager. Is it not better to keep all alert configuration central in prometheus alerting rules ?
If you use Prometheus and have everything that you want to alert on instrumented with Prometheus then of course that makes sense.
But if you want to alert on other data sources, and especially to see and manage all alerts in one place, then this is what Grafana Alerting now enables.
Example I encountered a while ago: Alert on billing throughput within a third party (not instrumented with Prometheus) billing system that has a RDBMS backend. The alert can be written in SQL and with the changes in Grafana 8 could be acted upon and routed just like the Prometheus alerts were.