Prometheus and Grafana: Visualizing Application Performance

Course details

Whether you are already familiar with Grafana or a beginner, Systems Reliability Engineer (SRE) Opeyemi Onikute guides you through what you need to use Prometheus and Grafana to monitor and analyze applications in the real-world. Learn about Prometheus as a data source and explore all the tools you need to succeed with Grafana as a whole, including other data sources in the future. Beyond Grafana, find out how to create world-class dashboards as a whole.

Learning objectives
Create and manage dashboards in Grafana with Prometheus.
Understand how to create world-class dashboards beyond Grafana through study of dashboard structure and layout, presentation and design, and charting.
Learn to manage Grafana dashboards automatically using infrastructure-as-code.
Apply what you learn with practical examples in the real world.
Understand the fundamental building blocks of Grafana such as panels, annotations, and queries.

Concepts

Introduction

Introduction to Prometheus and Grafana

Getting Started with Prometheus and Grafana

Introduction to observability
Introduction to dashboarding
Grafana overview and features
Prometheus overview
Grafana user interface overview

Installation and Configuration

Building Blocks for Mastering Grafana

Grafana data sources
Grafana dashboards
Grafana panels
Grafana queries
Grafana variables
Grafana transformations
Grafana annotations
Grafana plugins

Grafana Panels

Panel options
Panel overrides
The graph panel
The stats panel
The gauge panel
The heatmap panel

How to Design Practical Dashboards

Sample application
Structure and layout
Accessibility and presentation
Choosing the right panels
Naming and context

Alerts

Grafana Alerts introduction
Grafana Alerts states
Grafana Alert rules
Lab - Creating a simple alert

Generative AI and LLMs

Introduction to generative AI
How AI can help solve challenges in Grafana
Grafana and LLMs - Current features
The role of context awareness - RAG and MCPs
Lab 1 - An LLM assistant for troubleshooting
Lab 2 - Upgrading the assistant with MCP

Scaling Grafana Infrastructure with Terraform

Introduction to IaC
Grafana with Terraform overview
Installing and configure the Grafana provider
Defining a dashboard with Terraform

Grafana Administration

The configuration files
User and organization management
Plugin management

Conclusion

Next steps