Visualization Using Grafana

Video Tutorial

Creating Grafana Dashboards for Prometheus by co-developer of Prometheus.

• How to create a time-series chart, a guage panel, and a table.
• You can use a public Prometheus demo server at https://demo.promlabs.com to perform tasks in video.

In the tutorial, he creates a "Gauge" panel showing percentage CPU utilization (about 8:00 into video).

• The PromQL exression for cpu usage is:

  sum by(instance) (rate(demo_cpu_usage_seconds_total{mode != "idle"}[5m])) /
      on(instance) group_left() demo_num_cpus
  

• Specify units as % (0 - 1).
• Optional specify custom legend.

Units

The data collected from sources like Prometheus contains only numbers. It's up to the Panel creator to specify the units.

1. Select a Panel and choose "Edit" (3-dots in upper right corner of panel).
2. On right side ("Visualization" side-panel) click hour-glass to search.
3. Enter "Unit" in search box.
4. Under Units, should suitable unit type.
   • For data, e.g. virtual memory used, choose "Data" and either Bytes(IEC) or Bytes(SI).
   • Bytes(IEC) uses powers of 2. 1 MB (should be MiB) is 2^20, 1 GB (GiB) is 2^30.
   • Bytes(SI) uses powers of 10. 1 MB is 1,000,000 bytes.
5. When done, choose "Back to dashboard". Changes are saved when you click "Save Dashboard".