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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

Anyone using Grafana in production? I would like to hear some opinions and experiences. I found it a bit disappointing as in; at first impression it really looks amazing, and the charts are stunning. However once you go into the knitty gritty and find lacking user/role/permissions management it was disappointing.

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I use it every day against a (multi-tenant) Prometheus back-end. You have to put in quite a lot of effort to design the right queries and charts, but after that it works great for my needs.

We prefer to have dashboards under source control so generate them using grafanalib - see https://www.weave.works/blog/grafana-dashboards-as-code/

I think this approach shifts the need for roles and permissions as we never save dashboards from the UI.

Yes, we usa grafana in our team, but only isolated on internal network and with access only to 12 team members, so no real need for roles etc. We use zabbix, elasticsearch and graphite data sources. Works like a charm in our case, also embedded graphs are not ideal, but useful for internal dashboards and etc. So very positive experience so far. Before grafana integration we had kibana + graphite + zabbix as a 3 separate things.

Did they ever make it suitable for exposing to the public Internet? I've been wanting to embed Grafana charts in a public page [1] for a while now because they're just so much better than the other charting options out there.

[1] https://mhkweather.com

As arianvanp has pointed out, you can indeed create public read-only snapshots to share.

You can either create local link to a read-only version of what you're looking at right now. Whoever wants to access it, must be able to access the grafana host. Alternatively, you can upload the snapshot to the raintank site. I have just exported a snapshot of a panel on one of our dashboards, with only one of the panels' data, see https://snapshot.raintank.io/dashboard/snapshot/II7NYMU3v9vT... for an example. You can zoom in, but not further out.

You can also generate an iframe embed code (for a single panel), but if you want to share that in real-time publicly, you'd need to expose grafana to the public internet.

You can embed from a shared snapshot at raintank, as well. See the one above, if you click the title, you can 'Share' that and then embed it.

AFAIK, you can expose read only versions of graphs for embedding into pages these days

I use Grafana for everything. At work a part of every feature I do is a Grafana graph to monitor when the feature goes to production. At home I graph my blood glucose having information such as A1c always available for me real time.

Such a useful tool.

I've found the opposite to be true, once you get into the knotty gritty there's so much that can be customized to different use cases. You can have different organisations and 4 levels of user roles. Lots of ways to handle authentication, a great API so everything is scriptable and lots more. It may not quite fit your needs but there's been a lot of effort put into the details. I'd been interested to know the specifics of what you couldn’t achieve with it?

Grafana is incredible and 4.6 fixes my two major issues with it (no cloudwatch alerting and no postgres support).

It does take some training to get good at writing dashboards however. But it's free to try by either self-hosting it or with the personal plan on https://grafana.com. Highly recommended either way.

Why would permissions matter so much?

We use it, good experiences so far.

Giving different teams and outside partners (i.e. less trusted) access to a variety of dashboards, not just due to security but also to make it less confusing to these users.

Also, from what I've gathered the frontend can execute whatever query it wants on the backend without any kind of checks.

Grafana supports LDAP out of the box.

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