I FINALLY figured out how to drive the Grafana bus. I know, I know…pretty basic stuff. In the past I always drooled over dialed out dashboards I’ve seen. Charts, graphs, readouts, dials…but I never could quite wrap my head around it all.

Well, now I have charts, graphs, readouts, logs, dials, and it feels pretty good to have finally learned something new that I’ve been whacking away at for a while. The plus side is that the whole Graphana+Promtail+Loki stack sips lightly on my resources, whereas in the past, things like the ELK stack, Opensearch, Graylog, etc, really devoured a lot of resources. I really tried with those but just didn’t like how ravenous of a RAM appetite they had.

I’m still using lnav. It’s quick and dirty and gets the job done for logs. But if I want to look at data, with nice a prettyfied interface, I go look at Grafana. So now the process will be to, dial out and graph every last little thing until I suffer from info overload, and then ease it back to just what is necessary. It’s a fucked up process, but it’s how I do.

As my lady friend is apt to say: It’s the little things…