torkelo

Grafana is not a time series store or metric fetching agent. It s dashboard and graph composer that currently support Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB (and KariosDB via plugin).

So if you have metrics in one of those time series stores then Grafana is a really awesome tool for visualizing those metrics.

There are two datasource plugins here that might help you get a picture how to add new types of data sources to grafana. There is basically no documentation for how to write data sources so it requires some reverse enginering (trying to understand the existing datasources), but there is an interface, and custom data sources can provide their own UI editors. https://github.com/grafana/grafana-plugins

Its because InfluxDB does not have the same API for exploring the metric name hierarchy. But that will change with InfluxDB 0.9 where they will introduce measurements and tags and a lot of inspection queries that will enable a much better query building experience.

yes, but only for the import process that will read them from influxdb and save them into the grafana database (either embedded sqlite3 or external mysql, postgres).

InfluxDB is not really suitable as a general purpose data source (storing dashboards as influxdb metric series was more a temporary solution so influxdb users did not need to install elasticsearch, and influxdb dashboard storage did not support tag filtering).

With Grafana 2.0 needs to store a lot more, users, accounts, user starred dashboards & preferences. So a more general purpose database was needed.

For correlation between distinct events Graphite or any Time series database is not the right tool.

Time series are usually more about being able to collect huge amount of metrics. Metrics that can then be combined, averaged, filtered, put through a processing pipeline (analytical functions), summarized by different intervals. All in order to visualize (usually through graphs) recent live trends or long term trends and statistics.

Grafana is all about maximizing the power and ease of use of the underlying time series store so the user can focus om on building informative and nice looking dashboards. It is also about letting users define generic dashboards through variables that can be used in metric queries, this allows users to reuse the same dashboard for different servers, apps or experiments as long as the metric naming follows a consistent pattern.

Grafana also uses Elasticsearch but not for log analytics, but for annotating graphs with event/log information.

At some point in in the coming 1-3 years log analytics and metric analytics & visualization is going to converge and be solved/addressed by the same piece of software. But that is tricky right now without sacrificing either domain.

Yes, everything will be open source. Thanks to Grafana sponsors and me being part of the Raintank company that will provide SaaS and support services around Grafana and other existing open source monitoring/metrics projects as well as new components that we are working on (all open source!)

Thank you! Means a lot, been working on this in the dark for a very long time (I originally though it might be paid version of Grafana). Really great to have the code public and show of some of the great things the backend will enable.

No worry, I will try my best in keeping Grafana UI, design philosophy and focus intact as it expands its capability.

I am the creator and main developer of Grafana. I am currently working full time on it, so expect lots of polish and new features in the coming months!