thanos-io / thanos

Integrating Thanos with Grafana for Visualization

Scenario: A developer, named Alex, is working on a microservices-based application and wants to monitor and visualize the performance metrics using Grafana. Alex has already set up Thanos as the observability backend for their application. Now, Alex wants to configure Thanos to send data to Grafana for creating custom dashboards and gaining insights into monitoring data.

Solution: Thanos offers integrations with popular visualization tools like Grafana. To configure Thanos to send data to Grafana, follow these steps:

  1. Install and configure the Grafana Loki plugin:
  • Download and install the Grafana Loki plugin from the official Grafana plugin marketplace.
  • Configure the plugin with the Thanos HTTP endpoint URL and access token.
  1. Configure Thanos to send data to Grafana:
  • In the Thanos configuration file (located at cmd/thanos/config.go), add the following lines under the [receive.server] section:
[receive.server.plugins]
[receive.server.plugins.grafana]
enabled = true
  • Restart the Thanos server for the changes to take effect.
  1. Create a new data source in Grafana:
  • Log in to the Grafana web interface and create a new data source.
  • Select the Loki data source type and enter the Thanos HTTP endpoint URL and access token.
  1. Create custom dashboards in Grafana:
  • Use the Loki query language to create custom queries and visualize the monitoring data in Grafana.

Tests:

To verify that Thanos is sending data to Grafana, perform the following tests:

  1. Check the Grafana dashboard for the monitoring data:
  • Log in to the Grafana web interface and navigate to the created dashboard.
  • Verify that the monitoring data is being displayed correctly.
  1. Check the Thanos query logs for successful data forwarding:
  • Access the Thanos query logs and search for successful data forwarding messages.
  1. Check the Grafana plugin logs for successful data ingestion:
  • Access the Grafana plugin logs and search for successful data ingestion messages.
  1. Perform load testing on the application and verify that the monitoring data is being displayed correctly in Grafana.