4. Lab: WLAN Pi Grafana
Monitor and visualise "everything" with Grafana
Last updated
Monitor and visualise "everything" with Grafana
Last updated
Over the past 6 months or so, the WLAN Pi team has been busy designing and building features that will allow the WLAN Pi to more easily be deployed as a remote network sensor.
Deploy the WLAN Pi, collect data and metrics, then remotely monitor and visualize KPIs that matter, using a web-based tool called Grafana.
WLAN Pi + Grafana will enable you to visualize and analyze data collected, monitor your environment and optimize your network.
Grafana is an open-source web-based tool for monitoring and observability. It's commonly used to visualize time series data for infrastructure and application analytics. It's also flexible enough to support other types of data visualizations.
Here is an example Grafana dashboard. Dashboard is an easily customizable web page. No coding skills required, don't worry 😊 You can create comprehensive dashboards with panels that visualize data in various ways, such as graphs, histograms, heat maps, and tables. These dashboards can be tailored extensively, allowing you to present your data in an aesthetically pleasing format to your customer.
Grafana supports a wide range of data sources, including InfluxDB, Prometheus, Graphite, Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and many more.
During this lab, we will not use a database to store data. Instead we will stream the data directly into Grafana.
"I find Grafana a little overwhelming"
-an actual quote from Nick Turner
A great deal of the fiddly work has already been completed, that we can focus on the visualizations and building graphs that just look great.
Grafana provides a feature for alerting based on specific thresholds. If a metric breaches a particular condition, alerts can be sent out via various notifiers, such as email, Slack, or PagerDuty. We won't explore this in a great level of detail, but if you are interested in this, definitely spend some time after this Deep Dive on this.
The platform is extensible, with a plethora of plugins available to extend its capabilities. If there is a specific need that is not addressed by the core features, there is a good chance that a plugin exists (or can be created).
Users can annotate graphs with event logs, which helps in correlating data changes or anomalies with events, such as code deployments or infrastructure changes. So if your DNS goes down, you can add a little note in the actual graph as an explanation or reminder of what happened.
Learn more about Grafana:
Let's start with a little housekeeping. It is critical that your WLAN Pi system time is correct.
