Grafana 8.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Grafana 8.0

#21

Post by danlimerick » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

yakata wrote: post #19

I don't understand the duplication of alerting with Grafana/Alertmanager. Is it not better to keep all alert configuration central in prometheus alerting rules ?

Internally (in the Grafana team), we call it unified alerting because it is a unified UI for non-Prometheus data sources together with Prometheus alerting (and Loki/Cortex/Grafana Cloud alerting) and allows you to see all your alerts together.

- For Prometheus, can view and search for alerts.

- For Loki and Cortex, can create and edit alert rules. See Alertmanager data source: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/datasources/alertman...

- For non-Prometheus data sources, uses the Grafana alerting engine but also has an embedded Alertmanager. Can use the same routing, grouping, deduping and silencing features that Alertmanager provides but for data sources like InfluxDB or MySQL.

Re: Grafana 8.0

#22

Post by cduzz » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

A better list of new features in 8.0:

https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/whatsnew/whats-new-i...

I like grafana.

It's the de facto realtime graph consolidation platform where I work; if the thing you want to use for monitoring doesn't interact with grafana, you shouldn't bother trying to deploy it because the rest of the org will be blind to it.

Re: Grafana 8.0

#23

Post by slashdot2008 » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

Will grafana displace industrial historian and HMI software? historians just store time series data and allow you to plot it and cost $30k for a license? The HMI software suites usually have worse time series plotting and trending analysis than a historian but they allow you to put buttons on the screen to control your process, and come with some type of alarm display system.

Re: Grafana 8.0

#24

Post by crad » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

yakata wrote: post #19

I don't understand the duplication of alerting with Grafana/Alertmanager. Is it not better to keep all alert configuration central in prometheus alerting rules ?

I use a combination of:

- Graphite

- InfluxDB

- PostgreSQL

- Timescale

- CloudWatch

- Prometheus

The alerting in Grafana supporting all those variations is a godsend.

Re: Grafana 8.0

#25

Post by torkelo » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

slashdot2008 wrote: post #23

Will grafana displace industrial historian and HMI software? historians just store time series data and allow you to plot it and cost $30k for a license? The HMI software suites usually have worse time series plotting and trending analysis than a historian but they allow you to put buttons on the screen to control your process, and come with some type of alarm display system.

We hope so, a UI for placing buttons and hooking up graphics to metrics is in the works.

Re: Grafana 8.0

#26

Post by slashdot2008 » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

torkelo wrote: post #25

slashdot2008 wrote: post #23

Will grafana displace industrial historian and HMI software? historians just store time series data and allow you to plot it and cost $30k for a license? The HMI software suites usually have worse time series plotting and trending analysis than a historian but they allow you to put buttons on the screen to control your process, and come with some type of alarm display system.

We hope so, a UI for placing buttons and hooking up graphics to metrics is in the works.

great. Ignition from inductive automation is good, but old players like Allen Bradley / Rockwell Factory Talk, Citect, Wonderware, need a kick in the pants to get with the times.

Re: Grafana 8.0

#27

Post by AcerbicZero » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

I love using grafana however I abhor creating dashboards and trying to pull data, but that’s mostly because of a lack of documentation.

Re: Grafana 8.0

#28

Post by richardwhiuk » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 5:39 PM UTC

This is the first release under AGPL - feels like a major licensing change should be called out in the changelog.

Re: Grafana 8.0

#29

Post by 5e92cb50239222b » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

I somewhat regret upgrading my system, which is pulling data out of InfluxDB 2.

— categories now have "_value" in their names, I can't find how to fix this without adding hundreds of overrides.

— two-axis line charts have merged into a single axis and I can't find how to revert this. One series shows the CO₂ level and the other one shows the particulates. They have very different ranges. The PM line is now unreadable. I guess I'll have to split them into two separate charts.

— the time series chart seems to be a rewrite of what was already working fine — but now I can't easily reorder the Total, Min, Max, and other columns without removing and re-adding them; and they don't seem to be sortable (you could sort the legend in the old line chart and it remembered your preferences across page reloads)

— the legend rows can't be clicked with my vim-like navigation plugin (vimium) anymore. If anyone from Grafana is reading this, it's very easy to fix and should help with accessibility:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

On the other hand, the "Connect null values" feature is a lifesaver. My data sources are very unreliable (and I can't fix them because they are provided by a third party) and there were huge gaps there that were filled with meaningless interpolated data. (If it were +20°C outside a day ago and now it's +30°C, that doesn't mean that it was +25°C in the middle of the night when the sensor wasn't working). Now they look like proper empty gaps. Huge thank you to whoever came up with that feature!

Re: Grafana 8.0

#30

Post by mikewave » Tue, Jun 08, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

danlimerick wrote: post #18

KyleBrandt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just wanted to extend my thanks for this new feature, it will be really, really appreciated. We have Grafana monitoring everything from your usual cloud stuff, down to the temperatures of cryogenic fridges. Being able to configure alerts more dynamically and clearly is going to make my job a lot easier.

Can't wait to fire this up and start re-doing all my alerts.