Mixing
metrics and logs
with Grafana + Influx
David Kaltschmidt
@davkals
InfluxDays June 2019
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I’m David
Working on Explore, Prometheus,
and Loki at Grafana Labs
Previously:
Unifying Metrics/Logs/Traces at Kausal, Weavescope
david@grafana.com
Twitter: @davkals
Unified way to
look at data
from different
sources
Logos of datasources
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Feb 2019: Major release Grafana 6 with Explore and better panel editing
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Latest release: Grafana 6.2 with Bar Gauge, and lazy loading
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Grafana + Influx
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Dashboard with
Influx <= 1.7
- Graphical query builder
- InfluxQL
- Database authentication
via username/password
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New: Explore with
Influx <= 1.7
- New section for ad-hoc
queries
- Same query builder
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New: Explore with
Influx <= 1.7
- Table view to look at raw
values
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Log aggregation with Influx
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Troubleshooting journey
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Log aggregation with Influx
- Central place to store your application logs
- Revisit logs after apps/services/hosts have crashed
- Basic analytics support with query language
- Influx is not designed for logs, but may be “good enough”
- Running a second system for logs adds operational complexity
Try it out (1/3)
$> docker run --name influxdb -p 9999:9999 quay.io/influxdb/influxdb:2.0.0-alpha
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Try it out (2/3)
$> grafana-cli plugins install grafana-influxdb-flux-datasource
$> export INFLUX_TOKEN=
$> telegraf --config http://localhost:9999/api/v2/telegrafs/
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Try it out (3/3)
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Outlook
- Unifying Flux and Influx datasources
- Adding version drop-down to datasource config page
- Explore and panels render editors based on version
- Datasource uses appropriate API paths and authentication
mechanism
- Logs in Flux datasource
- Improve tag filtering UX
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Thank you.
UX feedback to
david@grafana.com
@davkals