You may already know how important it is to measure the performance of your app, or even how to integrate with tools such as Prometheus. But if you can’t visualize your data in an easy-to-read and organized manner, you won’t get much out of it. There’s a cool, open-source tool for that. In the last part of the Metrics in optimization process series, we’re teaching you how to create a dashboard in Grafana, so that you can produce a new dashboard that even the business department will follow.

What you will learn here

In the previous three articles, we talked about why you should measure your app’s metrics, how you can integrate it with Prometheus and how to go about collecting statistics.

Since we have now a lot of data to show we should think about the presentation layer. The true purpose of it is to present data in a way that gives us what we need, rather than just as a disorganized pile of trash. It will not just make pretties, but also far more useful. Another important thing is that the data, which we collected with Prometheus, doesn’t have an easy-to-read format. Today it’s time to show ugly metrics data in a beautiful way.

As you know from previous articles, we collect data from Kubernetes and our application. We are going to show an example of how to configure a dashboard, what is important, and why we did it this way. We are not going to show and describe all options in Grafana, just the ones that we needed to configure our charts (hey, it’s a crash course, after all!).

#developer stories #data #devops #grafana #kubernetes #prometheus