Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Grafana is one of the most popular dashboarding and visualization tools for metrics. The Grafana Dashboards are a very important part of infrastructure and application instrumentation. In this post, we will deep dive into Grafana dashboards. We will create a Grafana dashboard for a VM’s most important metrics, learn to create advanced dashboards with filters for multiple instance metrics, import and export dashboards, learn to refresh intervals in dashboards and learn about plugins.

AWS’s serverless technologies are popular because they provide cost effective scaling and great separation of concerns. However, observing serverless architectures like Lambda is challenging due to their transient nature and abstracted infrastructure. Unlike traditional systems with consistent hosts, serverless functions are ephemeral, often scaling rapidly and operating in isolation.

In the previous article I covered how to set up auto-instrumented tracing for a Node.js app using OpenTelemetry (OTEL). We then sent the spans directly to the open source tracing tool Jaeger. I recommend you give that a read first before walking through this guide because we're going to re-use the instrumentation we set up last time. Today we're going to take things a step further by introducing the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Grafana dashboards are powerful and flexible tools for observing applications and infrastructure, so it’s no surprise we get a lot of questions from the community about how to embed them into their web applications. Over the past few releases, we’ve developed a lot of options for how to do this in Grafana, but there can be confusion about how they work, and when to use each approach.

Prometheus is a very popular open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built in 2012. Its main focus is to provide valid insight into system performance by providing a way for certain variables of that system to be monitored. Prometheus displays the performance of these variables as a graph to allow its users to see their system’s performance at a glance.