Grafana

[Grafana](http://grafana.org) is the basis for all our metrics that come from our various services and applications. It offers a rich interface to analyse and view metrics and stats from the database, InfluxDB, or cloudwatch

Using Grafana

There are many features of Grafana that can be found in the documentation, however looking at existing dashboards is advised.

Grafana Admin

Grafana comes with a login system, this means that anyone can view Grafana without changing anything. If you want to make a change, simply create an account. The login does not require activation, so you can start making changes right away, you can also login via Github credentials.

Saving Dashboards

The Grafana interface allows you to save dashboards. These dashboards are stored in RDS using Postgres, this means when Grafana restarts, all you changes are still present.

Configuration Options

All options for Grafana are stored in the grafana.ini.

Setup on AWS

Create Security Group

Upload the RDS security group template

Create the RDS instance

Upload the RDS template, use the RDSSecurityGroup resource you just created

Create the Grafana instance

Upload the main template, use the RDSComponentSecurityGroup resource you just created. You will be asked for a grafana.ini URL, this is required as you will need to put your RDS Postgres details into a config file.

There is a sample config file in this repo, so you can either fork this repo or create a private gist/place in S3 to use with wget. This will overwrite the default config file provided by Grafana, there are a lot of config options for Grafana, see the docs for details