Grafana Metrics
Use This InfluxDB Integration for FreeGrafana is an open-source visualization and analytical tool that allows users to query, visualize, get alerts on and explore the metrics that matter most to them — regardless of where they are stored. It enables users to turn time series databases (TSDB) into graphs and visualizations that take even the most sophisticated concepts and make them far more accessible for people to understand.
Why use Grafana with InfluxDB?
Grafana includes a feature-rich data source plugin for InfluxDB (InfluxDB OSS, Cloud, or Enterprise) as a part of the core offering. The combination of InfluxDB and Grafana allows users to create monitoring solutions that cover a wide range of use cases spanning Infrastructure Monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring, or even monitoring any home or industrial sensor.
Pulling your metric data from your InfluxDB instance as a Grafana dashboard allows your teams to share data that empowers them to look for insights to drive performance improvements - the types of things that likely would have otherwise gone undiscovered. In addition, the built-in InfluxDB support in Grafana includes a rich query editor that supports both InfluxDB’s query languages, InfluxQL and Flux.
With InfluxQL support, you can continue to use all your existing dashboards. And with the added support of Flux, you can define complex queries through a set of functional transformations on data and do complex analytics with the language itself. You can also recompose parts of query functions with user-defined functions (udfs) to create shortcuts for standard functionality.
In addition, the Grafana query editor handles measurement, tag, and field value completion, automatic handling of grouping this data by time, and the ability to template InfluxDB queries for use across multiple dashboards easily. You can also alias patterns for short, readable series names and ad hoc filters for dashboard exploration that help developers achieve faster time to awesome.
How to use InfluxDB with Grafana
Grafana ships with a native feature-rich data source plugin for InfluxDB. The plugin includes a custom query editor that supports InfluxQL, Flux, annotations and query templates. When using Grafana, you can add the InfluxDB data source by following these simple steps:
- Open the side menu by clicking the Grafana icon in the top header.
- In the side menu under the Dashboards link, you should find a link named Data Sources.
- Click the + Add data source button in the top header.
- Select InfluxDB from the Type dropdown.
For a more detailed description of how to get started, check out the docs:
The possibilities of Grafana with Flux
With Grafana’s native support of Flux, users can bring powerful transformations and analytics to their existing monitoring solutions. Some key capabilities that are not possible with InfluxQL but easily accomplished with Flux include:
- Joins: Flux's
join()function allows you to join data from any bucket, any measurement, and on any columns. With non-temporal data, this can provide key context to the time series data. And when joining time series data together, you can get even better insights from the data. - Cross-compile: Work on top of Flux with other syntax like PromQL, InfluxQL, and others. Flux works on a single optimizer that plans against different sources.
- Window by calendar dates (months, years): Build dashboards that support month and year as duration unit to make forecasting and consumption easier for your users.
- Pivoting: Use the
pivot()function to organize data in another way to easily extract information by summarizing, sorting, or even grouping data.
Note that there is a wide range of additional use cases described in the Flux documentation that you might find valuable, which you can now view by clicking the button below.
