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by reilly3000 2003 days ago
Grafana is pretty great. There are a lot of built in connectors, but its ability to query arbitrary REST, JSON, oData etc endpoints along with databases makes it super flexible for what you mentioned.

https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/simpod-json-datasource

It has a great GUI for building queries, plus solid RBAC, great charting, and a very flexible alert system. Configure in their GUI, then get your dashboard's code in as JSON for deployment. You can also define dashboard in actual code, ie grafanalib in Python and others- which is great for DevOps. https://github.com/weaveworks/grafanalib

They have nice stylesheets ready for TV displays, but it gets really fun when users get their hands on it and can zoom in and drill down on time-series data, filter with dynamic parameters and such.
4 comments
juancn 2003 days ago
Grafana sucks in terms of UX, but it's free (it's main selling point) and supports many backends.

Creating dashboards is so freaking painful.

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yellow_lead 2000 days ago
I have liked it for what it's worth. My only pain point is bulk editing (no way to add something to every graph on a dashboard) and copying graphs across dashboards didn't seem so easy last time I tried it.
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RedShift1 2003 days ago
I wouldn't exactly call its charting abilities great, for example something as simple as aligning the Y axis over multiple charts can't be done, and for BI(-like) charts you need to go through a bunch of hoops to get them right. Also the alerting system is not flexible at all, it's primitive (but functional). All and all it's only through the flexibility of the database we use (Postgres) we're able to massage the data enough to display it the way we want.
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zubairq 2003 days ago
yeah Grafana is probably the default choice I see at most customer sites for dashboards!
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trevyn 2003 days ago
I can’t decipher their pricing at all. What kind of usage gets expensive?
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sdoering 2003 days ago
What pricing? Just get the open source version, install it on a local machine - or on any available server - and get going:

https://grafana.com/get

You do not need to use the hosted offering in that case.

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