Relational databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and others have a wealth of time series data locked inside of them. Often this data can be used to enhance observability dashboards, or keep track of important application factors, like how many users have signed up for a service. In this article, we’re going to show you how to visualize any time series from any SQL database in Grafana using the time series visualization.
Grafana Mimir is an open source distributed time series database. Publicly launched in March 2022, Mimir has been designed for storing and querying metrics at any scale. Highly available, highly performant, and cost-effective, Mimir is the underlying system powering Grafana Cloud Metrics, and it’s used by a growing open source community that includes individual users, small start-up companies, and large enterprises like OVHcloud.
DORA metrics, not to be confused with the beloved children’s cartoon character, are a bit trendy at the moment in the world of technology. The DevOps Research and Assessment group (DORA) is run out of Google. They run surveys and do research into what makes organizations successful in the Digital Age. They’re probably most well known for their yearly State of DevOps Reports and the book Accelerate.
Today I want to talk about metric queries. More specifically, I want to talk about an important concept that is going to make your queries run faster, give you more accurate results, and make your Grafana Loki operators (like me) much happier. A metric query in Loki looks like this: And the part I want to talk about is that at the end. Now, if you’re like me and have a short attention span and are already bored — I understand.
The Grafana Labs ecosystem is built on a range of different projects that incorporate logs, metrics, traces across load testing, and Kubernetes monitoring. I’ll assume you know all of that data (and more!) can be visualized in Grafana. What made my observability dream become reality, though, is how these systems can work together to help you effectively debug performance issues and operate your system with more confidence.
“So you get paged and wake up in the middle of the night, you don’t know what’s going on, and there you are needing to figure things out — What kind of tabs do I need open? Where do I find the logs? Where are the dashboards and the metrics?” If you’ve ever been on call, this refrain, voiced by Alexander Rösel, Senior Software Engineer at Ultimate, will sound all too familiar.
As more people and organizations adopt Prometheus and Grafana for observability, we at Grafana Labs want to make it easier for this expanding pool of users to answer questions about their systems, regardless of whether they’re experts or novices. That’s why we’re adding a feature to enhance metric browsing in the Prometheus query builder in addition to the metric select.