Exploring Metrics with Grafana¶

Grafana now has two methods of exploring metrics. Explore and explore Explore Metrics. See Grafana's Explore Documentation Note that neither of these methods knows much about the metric units, thus the displayed units at times may be confusing.

Explore¶

This page allows you to select a metric name and then add label filters to create a query.

Select the hamburger (three horizontal lines) found in the upper left of the page to expand the menu options. Select Explore. This will open the Explore page. Select the Metrics browser drop down to activate a list of all of the available metrics. You can also type into the field to search for metric names. Selecting a metric will then show all of the available label names that correspond with the metric.

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You may select as many labels and values as needed. As you make the selections the resulting query string will appear in the Resulting selector. In this example we have choosen the metrics dataplaneBitsIn with the label src_rack as atl.

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Use the Query button to run the query and show the results.

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The bottom section will show the Raw or Table view of the returned results. The Raw view is just the JSON strings consiting of the metric name and its labels plus the value to the right.

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The Table view shows a table with sortable columns and controlls to add more filters to the query.

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Here the dst_rack = dall filter was added.

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Explore Metrics¶

The Metric Explorer is a powerful tool that provides an in depth exploration into a metric, its labels, sample values and related metrics. See Grafana's Explore Metrics Help Note that this is a new feature and may be changing.

Select the hamburger (three horizontal lines) found in the upper left of the page to expand the menu options. Select Metrics under Explore. This will open the Metrics Explore page. Click the New metric exploration button.

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Click Select in the upper right hand of a metric you would like to explore. Let's select dataplanInBits.

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We are now presented with a view with an average graph of the choosen metric and 3 sub-tabs - Overview, Breakdown and Related Metrics

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Breakdown Shows all the labels for the choosen metric. Hovering over a label graph will show a list of all the lable values are possible.

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Click Select in the upper right corner of a label graph to see a graph for all of the possible labels. In this case, dst_rack. We can see that ncsa appears to have more traffic than other destination racks. We could click on Add to filters on the ncsa graph to add a filter for dst_rack=ncsa.

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Related Metrics Shows metrics that may be similar or usefull in relation to the selected metrics.

In this case the dataplaneInBits is actually created using the ifHCInOctets. The "if" metrics are interface metrics.

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Typing "if" into the Search metrics bar will reveal more interface metrics.

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Hovering over the information image.png icon will show information about the metrics. In this case, a description of the metrics along with the MIB OID that was used to obtain these metric values via SNMP.

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