Hacker News Reader

Comment by posix86 | Hacker News Reader

Why's everyone hating on Grafana? I find it fairly easy to use, it has a good balance between power & simplicity. And with docker you can make it run in seconds.

View on HN

No one is "hating" on Grafana. But if you used tools of the past, you'd know how light they were compared to the Grafana/Kibana/Elastic mongrel.

But I should mention that there is nothing "stupid simple" about the solution of the OP. Just look at the install procedure... https://tomscii.sig7.se/umon/

what in the... what is the point?? I've used Grafana many times and it's always, always a simple docker start -v, ..., and modifying some configs to get started. This tool is completely useless.

The difficult thing for me was understanding how to think about and then configure agents. I never could reason about getting the central server up and then connecting nodes to it, whether those nodes were applications or entire servers. The terminology didn't make sense to me and it made me question whether I had the right framing for the purpose of grafana.

In the authors case he used Prometheus and Grafana was just the "frontend" for it. Basically a way to build pretty dashboards our of your PromQL queries. There's no Grafana agent you have to configure.

Using Docker to run in seconds is like saying using a Windows VM in Qemu and you got Office running in seconds on Free BSD.

It’s still a mess, but it’s hidden now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com