Using Graphite in Grafana

    Refer to Add a data source for instructions on how to add a data source to Grafana. Only organization admins can add data sources. To learn more about the Graphite data source, refer to Graphite’s .

    To access Graphite settings, hover your mouse over the Configuration (gear) icon, then click Data Sources, and then click the Graphite data source.

    Graphite query editor

    Grafana includes a Graphite-specific query editor to help you build your queries.

    To see the raw text of the query that is sent to Graphite, click the Toggle text edit mode (pencil) icon.

    Click Select metric to start navigating the metric space. Once you start, you can continue using the mouse or keyboard arrow keys. You can select a wildcard and still continue.

    Functions

    Click the plus icon next to Function to add a function. You can search for the function or select it from the menu. Once a function is selected, it will be added and your focus will be in the text box of the first parameter.

    • To edit or change a parameter, click on it and it will turn into a text box.

    • To delete a function, click the function name followed by the x icon.

      Graphite - 图6

    Some functions like aliasByNode support an optional second argument. To add an argument, hover your mouse over the first argument and then click the + symbol that appears. To remove the second optional parameter, click on it and leave it blank and the editor will remove it.

    To learn more, refer to Graphite’s documentation on functions.

    Sort labels

    If you want consistent ordering, use sortByName. This can be particularly annoying when you have the same labels on multiple graphs, and they are both sorted differently and using different colors. To fix this, use sortByName().

    You can reference queries by the row “letter” that they’re on (similar to Microsoft Excel). If you add a second query to a graph, you can reference the first query simply by typing in #A. This provides an easy and convenient way to build compounded queries.

    Avoiding many queries by using wildcards

    Occasionally one would like to see multiple time series plotted on the same graph. For example we might want to see how the CPU is being utilized on a machine. You might initially create the graph by adding a query for each time series, such as cpu.percent.user.g, cpu.percent.system.g, and so on. This results in n queries made to the data source, which is inefficient.

    To be more efficient one can use wildcards in your search, returning all the time series in one query. For example, cpu.percent.*.g.

    Modify the metric name in my tables or charts

    Use alias functions to change metric names on Grafana tables or graphs For example aliasByNode() or aliasSub().

    Point consolidation

    All Graphite metrics are consolidated so that Graphite doesn’t return more data points than there are pixels in the graph. By default, this consolidation is done using avg function. You can control how Graphite consolidates metrics by adding the Graphite consolidateBy function.

    To combine time series, click Combine in the Functions list.

    Data exploration and tags

    In Graphite, everything is a tag.

    When exploring data, previously-selected tags are used to filter the remaining result set. To select data, you use the function, which takes tag expressions (=, !=, =~, !=~) to filter timeseries.

    The Grafana query builder does this for you automatically when you select a tag.

    Template variables

    Instead of hard-coding things like server, application, and sensor name in your metric queries, you can use variables in their place. Variables are shown as drop-down select boxes at the top of the dashboard. These dropdowns make it easy to change the data being displayed in your dashboard.

    For more information, refer to .

    Graphite 1.1 introduced tags and Grafana added support for Graphite queries with tags in version 5.0. To create a variable using tag values, use the Grafana functions tags and tag_values.

    For more details, see the Graphite docs on the autocomplete API for tags.

    The query you specify in the query field should be a metric find type of query. For example, a query like prod.servers.* fills the variable with all possible values that exist in the wildcard position.

    The results contain all possible values occurring only at the last level of the query. To get full metric names matching the query use expand function (expand(*.servers.*)).

    Comparison between expanded and non-expanded metric search results

    The expanded query returns the full names of matching metrics. In combination with regex, it can extract any part of the metric name. By contrast, a non-expanded query only returns the last part of the metric name. It does not allow you to extract other parts of metric names.

    Here are some example metrics:

    • prod.servers.001.cpu
    • prod.servers.002.cpu
    • test.servers.001.cpu

    The following examples show how expanded and non-expanded queries can be used to fetch specific parts of the metrics name.

    As you can see from the results, the non-expanded query is the same as an expanded query with a regex matching the last part of the name.

    You can also create nested variables that use other variables in their definition. For example apps.$app.servers.* uses the variable $app in its query definition.

    Using __searchFilter to filter query variable results

    The example below shows how to use __searchFilter as part of the query field to enable searching for server while the user types in the dropdown select box.

    Query

    TagValues

    Variable usage

    You can use a variable in a metric node path or as a parameter to a function.

    There are two syntaxes:

    • ${varname} Example: apps.frontend.${server}.requests.count

    Why two ways? The first syntax is easier to read and write but does not allow you to use a variable in the middle of a word. Use the second syntax in expressions like my.server${serverNumber}.count.

    Example:

    Variable usage in tag queries

    Multi-value variables in tag queries use the advanced formatting syntax introduced in Grafana 5.0 for variables: {var:regex}. Non-tag queries will use the default glob formatting for multi-value variables.

    Example of a tag expression with regex formatting and using the Equal Tilde operator, =~:

    For more information, refer to .

    allow you to overlay rich event information on top of graphs. You add annotation queries via the Dashboard menu / Annotations view.

    Graphite supports two ways to query annotations. A regular metric query, for this you use the Graphite query textbox. A Graphite events query, use the Graphite event tags textbox, specify a tag or wildcard (leave empty should also work)

    Get Grafana metrics into Graphite

    Grafana exposes metrics for Graphite on the /metrics endpoint. For detailed instructions, refer to .

    Configure the data source with provisioning

    It’s now possible to configure data sources using config files with Grafana’s provisioning system. You can read more about how it works and all the settings you can set for data sources on the

    Here are some provisioning examples for this data source.

    Graphite queries get converted to Loki queries when the data source selection changes in Explore. Loki label names and values are extracted from the Graphite queries according to mappings information provided in Graphite data source configuration. Queries using tags with seriesByTags() are also transformed without any additional setup.

    Refer to the Graphite data source settings for more details.