Creating Visualizations in Grafana

In this article, we will learn how to create visualizations in Grafana for monitoring. Our aim is to create a visualization that shows the hit count of an endpoint.

Assumptions

1. You have a REST application which exposes Prometheus metrics as an endpoint (in our case, http://localhost:9000/actuator/prometheus). Follow this article for a step by step guide to expose metrics. You can get the application I used from this GitHub repository.
2. You have a working instance of Prometheus and Grafana running. If not, follow the steps in this article to set things up and running.

Let's create our visualization following the steps below:

1. Add your metrics endpoint as a datasource in Grafana. You can follow this article for a step-by-step guide.
2. Create a visualization
   1. Click in the "+" icon on right sidebar.
   2. From the Create menu, select "Dashboard."
   3. Select "Singlestat" in the "add" tab in a new panel (as we only have a single count gauge).
   4. A blank panel will be added to the screen. Click on the drop-down icon on the panel title. Select "Edit" from the options.
   5. Select "General" from the tabs. You can edit basic information from this screen. In the title section, you can rename the title for the panel — let's say "Get Person Count."
   6. Select the "Metrics" tab and from the "Data Source" drop-down, select "prometheus-local" (remember that we added this as our datasource in an earlier step). Add the below query in the query section provided: http_server_requests_seconds_count{exception="None",instance="localhost:9000",job="person-app",method="GET",status="200",uri="/person"}
   7. In the "Options" tab, click on to the checkbox for "show" in the Gauge section. You can change the colors and other options if you want to.
   8. Save the changes by pressing "CTRL + S". Enter comments and click "save."
   9. You should be able to see the total hit count for the "/person" api in a guage.
   10. Congratulations! We got our gauge showing the total hit count. Below is a sample dashboard created for JVM monitoring.

In our next article, we shall be monitoring a MySQL database using Grafana.