peber7 commented 1 year ago

Spike: Research the ins and outs of Grafana

Problem Statement

The team knows little to nothing about Grafana. What is Grafana and what resources would it offer to the project?

Goal

We want to understand what Grafana is, how it works, its useful features, and how it could potentially be integrated into the project

Questions

List the specific questions you need to answer to achieve your goal. These should be small, manageable questions that will help you make progress.

[x] What is Grafana?
[x] What frontend resources does it provide?
[x] What backend resources does it provide?
[x] What are the strengths and weaknesses of Grafana?
[x] How could Grafana be integrated into the project?

Research Tasks

List the specific tasks you need to perform to answer the questions and achieve your goal. These should be small, manageable tasks that will help you make progress.

[x] Features have been researched and documented
[x] Frontend implications have been researched and documented
[x] Backend implications have been researched and documented
[x] Strengths have been researched and documented
[x] Weaknesses have been researched and documented
[x] How the team would set up and integrate Grafana into the dashboard has been researched and documented
[ ] Documentation is reviewed by all team members

Results and Conclusion

Summarize the results of your research. What did you learn? What worked? What didn't work? What are the implications of the results?

Based on your results, what is your conclusion? What do you recommend? What is your next step?

peber7 commented 1 year ago

Research Notes:

Grifana Spike (2).pdf

peber7 commented 1 year ago

Conclusion (Edit): Grafana will work in theory for this project. Although it doesn't provide the complete frontend we want. It will act as the frontend's best friend. It will be used to centralize all of the data from data sources and create visualizations for us. We will be able to use embedded html to display these graphs on our frontend.

AndreasLc1103 commented 1 year ago

if possible while this is still in review could you find any documentation that would allow for integrations with a front-end library like React, or Vue? I understand that this is just a front-end ingestion application but it would be utilized for that as the complexity of implementing our own metrics dashboard might be a little too out of scope. I agree that this would need a buffer or data ingestion service to prepare the data before being visualized. this type of application is similarly implemented by the elk stack, which infers we need data layers before showing any data to a front-end service.

peber7 commented 1 year ago

I'm glad you brought this up. I previously was looking into using grafana solely as the front-end, which still isn't what we want. But after searching for a bit more , we can embed graphs/components that we create on Grafana to integrate it as html in the dashboard that we use. These are the steps:

open desired dashboard,
click Share button near the dashboard name ( upper-left corner of the page ) ,
set options you like/need,
Copy the generated link
paste it as on the website

This is a quick video that I found we can use as a reference for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct9PjmrExzo&ab_channel=VikasJha

So Grafana as a front end wont do, but we can use it for the middle ware for the metric collection and graph integration through embedded html components.

AndreasLc1103 commented 1 year ago

https://blog.logrocket.com/best-practices-react-iframes/