The start of device monitoring
Infrastrcture Overview
When using Grafana Cloud you have access to:
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- Alert Manager
- Loki
- Grafana Agent
This post will go over what each of these tools do and how they work together.
Grafana
Grafana is a dashboard platform that lets you visualize data. It works as a frontend for all of the data that you collect. There is multiple prebuilt dashboards that can be found here
Prometheus
Prometheus is a data store that specializes in time series metrics. This is the tool that will take in and store all of your data. It uses promQL to search and filter metrics.
Alert Manager
Alert Manager is an alert management system. In Alert Manager you can create alerts and specify where they get sent to.
Loki
Loki is a log gathering tool. Loki can be used to gather logs from your system and send them to the cloud so they can be viewed by Grafana.
Grafana Agent
The Grafana Agent is a light weight application that runs on edge devices that you are monitoring. This agent sends metrics data to the Prometheus backend. It can be configured to send any metrics you want.