I FINALLY figured out how to drive the Grafana bus. I know, I know…pretty basic stuff. In the past I always drooled over dialed out dashboards I’ve seen. Charts, graphs, readouts, dials…but I never could quite wrap my head around it all.
Well, now I have charts, graphs, readouts, logs, dials, and it feels pretty good to have finally learned something new that I’ve been whacking away at for a while. The plus side is that the whole Graphana+Promtail+Loki stack sips lightly on my resources, whereas in the past, things like the ELK stack, Opensearch, Graylog, etc, really devoured a lot of resources. I really tried with those but just didn’t like how ravenous of a RAM appetite they had.
I’m still using lnav. It’s quick and dirty and gets the job done for logs. But if I want to look at data, with nice a prettyfied interface, I go look at Grafana. So now the process will be to, dial out and graph every last little thing until I suffer from info overload, and then ease it back to just what is necessary. It’s a fucked up process, but it’s how I do.
As my lady friend is apt to say: It’s the little things…
ETA: I have cAdvisor rockin’ plus influxDB, and the the thing is only sipping like max 2 GB. I’ve got logs, dials, charts n’ graphs. I got bitches in the living room gettin’ it on…This is amazing for such little processing power.
At least you would know, and you would learn something new as I have done. I have set up to monitor syslogs, ufw logs, assorted metrics so far. I’m going to tackle using cAdvisor and ingest the data into Prometheus and display such data on my Grafana dash.
It’s fun and educational. Try it. At the very least when you’ve worn all the new off, you can just delete the docker containers.