Posts

Exploring Grafana and InfluxDB

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Most recently, I've been exploring using Grafana and InfluxDB as a way to aggregate metrics in one happy place. It's also useful that Grafana has some downloadable dashboards for some existing software, and making new dashboards is as easy as writing some queries and adding it to an existing visualization.It's also got a handy alert system... what more could you want? Setting up Grafana and InfluxDB wasn't too hard. The documentation is very useful and to setup a test instance was easy. I would have preferred using a docker instance, but since I needed it able to connect to things in my company's network, had to place it on some old Windows Server 2012 R2 machine *ugh*. Luckily this wasn't much of an issue, and after the installation, was easily able to wire it up to an Octopus Deploy database with a premade dashboard specifically for Octopus and was instantly bombarded with stunning visuals and more information about my deployments than I could have ever ...

The Return

The 3rd or 4th attempt at starting a blog... I've written a few posts here and there, starting when I was doing a lot of PHP, WordPress and Joomla mostly. Then I got into the Microsoft stack and "Enterprise" software. Now I do DevOps! Hopefully all of my older posts are lost in the ether, although I thought nothing is ever truly deleted from the internet. In the past, I tried doing a few technology tutorials, advice on running your own freelance web design company, and some random thoughts. I should make this blog meta - a blog about how to start a blog and find a purpose for a blog... inevitably this is my biggest weakness - consistently creating content and focusing on any one thing for a long period time - outside of my regular 9 to 5. I tend to enjoy consuming content more than creating it. It is possible for me to take on small side projects, but they can't be much more than a weekends worth of work. I need to learn how to do small incremental practice over a l...