hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1932.txt

Episode: 1932
Title: HPR1932: Klaatu interviews Grafana
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1932/hpr1932.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:18:29

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This is HPR episode 1932 entitled, Clare to Interviews Brafana and is part of the series,
Interviews.
It is hosted by Clare to and is about 8 minutes long.
The summer is an interview with the Drafana project at all, things open conference 2015.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
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Hi everyone, this is Clare to you and I'm at the All Things Open Conference.
I'm talking to Torco from Brafana.
So what is Brafana?
Yeah, Grafana is an open source to a website that can download and install and allows you to
build dashboard and visualize time series metrics.
So it's heavily focused on graphs and time series, hence the name Grafana.
It's started out as an alternative dashboard for graphite, which is a really popular tool
for visualizing application metrics and infrastructure metrics and anything really.
So it's started out as an alternative dashboard for that, but since then it becomes a leading
tool for visualizing time series metrics from any time series store.
So it supports inflex DB and open TSDB and in the upcoming release, even metrics from
Elasticsearch as well.
Oh wow, correct me if I'm wrong.
It sounds like the main audience is kind of like web service type companies or people.
Yeah, I mean, the main usage for Grafana is to gain observability and monitor your infrastructure
for maybe IO memory, it is scared.
So that's maybe 30%, 40% and remaining 30%, 40% are application metrics and the combination
of application metrics and server infrastructure metrics.
So an application metrics can be anything.
It can be performance metrics for application or business or use of behavior metrics.
Now, when you say application, do you mean like literally an application?
Like I'm running like, I don't know, a graphics application or something.
And I want to see how quickly it's rendering or something.
Well, when I say application metrics, it could be, it's mainly sort of server applications.
Okay.
So that's my web server.
Yeah, yeah, your PHP backend or your .net to Java backend or whatever sort of server
application you're running or services.
So there are a ton of these libraries out there that allows you to instrument your application
to send metrics to graphite or in such DB.
And that allows you to know what your application is doing and also where the performance bottlenecks
are.
So it sounds like Grafana, I mean, it must by nature, I would think, be fairly modular.
I mean, because it sounds like you can kind of attach it basically anything.
Is that correct or do you need like an infrastructure?
Well, I mean, it's modular in there are two kinds of abstractions really in that there
are visualization types called panels that you build dashboards around.
Okay.
The actual like the graphs that people are going to look at.
So there are like two core panels that ship with Grafana that are the graph panel and
the signals that panel and there are other sort of more panels as well.
So the other main component is a data source.
So that's a very sort of rich thing in Grafana that defines how a panel can get its data.
So a data source can be a graphite data source or influx DB data source.
But in each data source also has the concept of query editor because the main sort of
velocity in Grafana is to make it easy to build dashboards but also query data sources.
So these query editors can be really complex and rich to make it easy to find the metrics
you want and find the sort of explore the data's data sets you have.
So is that it's like a built-in sort of very language that you're using?
Yes.
So each of these data sources like graphite, influx DB or open t's, they have different
concepts for how you query the data and different query languages.
So what these different query editors do is sort of expose the power for those query
languages through different sort of UI.
So the graphite query looks very different from the influx DB editor because they have
very different query languages.
What is Grafana written in?
Yeah, so the backend is written and go but the frontend is all JavaScript, HTML and using
Angular framework and I'm looking at moving it to Angular 2 and that sort of comes out.
So most of the code is in the frontend but the backend that is written and go is getting
more and more features as it started out as a frontend own application.
So kind of recently gained a backend to support more rich features.
All the core philosophy is to make a tool that is usable by everyone so not to relegate
it to an ops department.
So I mean I'm a developer, I started using graphite and metrics to get insight into that
production environment for my applications and demos going on but I also find user and
business metrics really useful.
So I kind of had this phrase we have a poster as well called democratized metrics and the
whole idea behind that concept is to make metrics tools more accessible to everyone and
not have only operation metrics and only application metrics or only business insights
or business intelligence metrics but to have a tool that can actually combine all of these
and make them accessible to everyone.
I mean graphana doesn't really care what it is you're visualizing as long as the data
resides in and of its supported data stores.
Most users for infrastructure and performance and application metrics but then there are
really fun cases where someone built a public graphana dashboard visualizing the availability
of bikes in Calgary and someone in Japan built a public dashboard visualizing the queue
length for public hospitals.
That's nice.
I mean and some use graphana for sort of home motivation and whether so there's graphana
is very open-ended in what you can use it for as long as the data is available somewhere.
Because my job doesn't require me to monitor that much stuff right now I'm just really thinking
about like how I can get this home and just have a go at it.
So where can people like either try it or obtain it?
You can learn more about graphana at the site graphana.org and at that site you can also
find links to a play and demo site where you can actually play around with graphs and
look how it works.
So you're an open source project are you also a business?
Graphana itself is a completely sort of open source project, 100% open source.
Behind graphana is a company called Graintank that is sponsoring development and me and
two other guys are co-founding this venture to commercialize certain aspects of graphana.
We are trying to build an open source metrics and monitoring system and you can find more
information on Reintank at Reintank.io.
Cool.
Yeah I will check both of those things out.
I've seen the demos at your booth and it's really pretty to look at.
It's really cool.
So thank you so much.
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