Easier O&M Visualization
Managed Service for Grafana is a cloud-native data visualization platform that provides all-in-one capabilities for site reliability engineers (SREs), research and development (R&D) engineers, and other IT personnel. Managed Service for Grafana helps meet the requirements for data visualization, data query, and alerting in scenarios such as O&M, monitoring, business analysis, and presentations.
Create Charts and Tables to Visualize Massive Data
Managed Service for Grafana provides plug-ins that can integrate approximately 100 data sources. You can use VPC data channels to aggregate data across clouds, regions, and VPCs. Managed Service for Grafana supports approximately 100 chart and table components and dashboard templates to display and analyze data of different types.
Comprehensively Improve Data and Account Security
Managed Service for Grafana supports single sign-on (SSO) using Alibaba Cloud accounts and self-managed accounts. This ensures data security and allows fine-grained management of data sources and dashboards.
Enhance Alerting Accuracy and Organizational Collaboration
Managed Service for Grafana integrates collaboration tools such as DingTalk, Lark, and WeCom and provides low-code tools for pre-processing events to implement easy deduplication and denoising.
Features
Data Import
Managed Service for Grafana integrates various data sources such as Alibaba Cloud services, SQL databases, time series databases, logs, traces, and enterprise-grade applications.
Data Query
Managed Service for Grafana supports the PromQL and SQL query languages and various preset functions to help reduce query workloads.
Data Visualization
Managed Service for Grafana allows you to choose from more than 100 preset tables and charts to display and analyze data of different types. The tables and charts include the heatmap, 3D map, topological graph, and hierarchy chart.
Alert Management
Managed Service for Grafana is compatible with common collaboration tools that can create and manage alert policies and permissions.
Authentication Management and Security Audit
Managed Service for Grafana supports SSO using Alibaba Cloud accounts and self-managed accounts. Managed Service for Grafana also provides a security audit feature to enhance security on these accounts.
O&M
Managed Service for Grafana supports the management of plug-ins, custom parameters, versions, and virtual private clouds (VPCs).
Comparison between Alibaba Cloud Managed Service for Grafana and Open-Source Grafana
Item | Alibaba Cloud Managed Service for Grafana | Open-Source Grafana |
---|---|---|
Resource purchase and service deployment | Provides out-of-the-box capabilities | Requires manual operations (such as purchasing a server, configuring the network service, creating a Grafana image, specifying the public IP address, and applying for the Internet Content Provider (ICP) filing of the domain name) |
Data sources | Supported | Supported |
Access to data sources in VPCs | Supported |
Requires manual configuration The VPC must be deployed in the same region as your Managed Service for Grafana |
Integration with Alibaba Cloud services | Integrates Managed Service for Prometheus, Log Service, and CloudMonitor | Not supported |
Data storage duration and fees | Provides free storage | Requires manual configuration |
Default templates |
Provides built-in templates and supports synchronization of dashboard templates from Managed Service for Prometheus |
Not supported |
Internet access |
Enables Internet access without the need for manual configuration Independent public IP addresses are supported |
Requires manual configuration |
Login account | Supports SSO using your Alibaba Cloud account | Requires a separate Grafana account |
O&M | Allows visualized operations in the Alibaba Cloud Management console | Requires manual command execution |
Version update | Automatically updates to the latest official version | Requires manual operations |
SLA guarantee | Supports SLA guarantee using dedicated instances, multiple replicas, dedicated high-performance databases, dedicated bandwidths, and independent domain names | Not supported |
Data security | Automatically fixes vulnerabilities, performs network access control, and provides dedicated databases to isolate data | Requires manual operations |
Enterprise-grade features | Supports automatic generation of dashboards and reports, audits, enterprise-specific unified logon, user invitation, custom domain name and domain name resolution, data backup, data restoration, and data migration | Not supported |
Data migration | Supports data migration from self-managed Grafana services and Prometheus instances of the Shared Edition | Requires manual data import |
Scenarios
Centralized Data Visualization for O&M and Monitoring
As customers use more cloud services, various complex monitoring systems are required (such as logging and application performance monitoring (APM) systems.) However, the monitoring data cannot be displayed and analyzed on one platform. Customers cannot obtain the status of cloud services at the earliest opportunity (such as message queues, databases, and Function Compute). In this case, customers may fail to handle exceptions and implement automatic fault recovery.
Challenges
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Difficulty in Data Aggregation: Monitoring data of different cloud services are not aggregated and displayed on one platform. This increases O&M difficulties.
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Difficulties in O&M and Monitoring: You must repeatedly configure key metrics to create monitoring charts and reports for different cloud services.
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Difficulty in Alert Management: Cloud services have independent alert rules that cannot be managed in a centralized manner.
Benefits
Default Integration: Managed Service for Grafana integrates core Alibaba Cloud services (such as elastic computing and database services).
Centralized Dashboards: You can visualize O&M data from multiple data sources in a fine-grained manner.
Centralized Alerting: You can build a centralized alerting system easily and improve the efficiency of alert management.
Visualization and Analysis of Business Data
Customers want to visualize data from various office automation (OA) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. If complex heterogeneous data can be converted into charts, business personnel can identify market trends and business opportunities easily.
Challenges
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Access Difficulty: Heterogeneous data sources lack a centralized access portal, and multiple accounts of the same enterprise can only separately access enterprise-grade applications.
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Inconsistent Visual Displays: Business metrics and trends are displayed in visualization components in different styles.
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Weak Security: You must manually fix vulnerabilities, perform network access control, and back up and restore data.
Benefits
Abundant Plug-Ins: Grafana Service provides approximately 100 data source plug-ins compatible with mainstream products.
Scenario-Specific Templates: You can use the templates to quickly create dashboards for data visualization. This lessens the workload of configuring metrics and dashboards from scratch.