Grafana

By using the Instana data source plug-in for Grafana, you can achieve the following goals:

  • Build custom dashboards with data from Instana
  • View the Instana metrics data in the Grafana UI
  • View the Instana MobileApp metrics data that is ingested from Instana in the Grafana UI

Supported platforms

You must make sure that the following supported platforms are available to build custom dashboards with the Instana data source plug-in for Grafana:

  • Grafana 7.0.0 and later versions
  • Instana 259 or later versions is needed to view the Instana metrics data in the Grafana UI and also to view the Instana MobileApp metrics data from the Grafana UI
  • The Grafana Instana plug-in 3.3.9 adds query filters in the Grafana UI for mobile app analysis and also enables the includeSynthetic parameter for infrastructure analysis.

Features of Instana data source plug-in for Grafana

The following features of Instana are used by the Instana data source plug-in to pull the Instana data directly into the Grafana dashboards for data visualization:

  • Dynamic Focus queries
  • Monitoring of applications, websites, mobile applications, and infrastructures
  • Automatic completion for available Types and Metrics when you choose one of the categories in Grafana UI
  • Uses Instana REST API
  • Data security by using access tokens

Installing Instana data source plug-in on Grafana

Installing Instana data source plug-in on Grafana cloud

With a one-click, you can install and update the plug-ins on a Grafana cloud instance.

It might take up to 1 minute to see the plug-in in your Grafana.

For more information about the plug-in installation, see Install a plug-in.

Installing Instana data source plug-in on a local Grafana

For local instances, plug-ins are installed and updated by using a CLI command. However, plug-ins are not updated automatically. You are notified when updates are available within your Grafana.

To install Instana data source plug-in on a local Grafana, complete the following steps:

  1. Install the Instana data source that is used to display the response data from the REST API calls on the Instana components in Grafana UI. For more information, see README.md.

  2. Use the grafana-cli tool to install Instana data source plug-in from the command line. For example, see the following command:

    grafana-cli plugins install instana-datasource

    The plug-in is installed into your Grafana plug-ins directory. /var/lib/grafana/plugins is the default directory.

Alternatively, you can manually download the .zip file from https://grafana.com/api/plugins/instana-datasource/versions/3.3.8/download, and unpack it into your Grafana plug-ins directory. Then, follow the instruction that is displayed on the window to install the Instana data source plug-in.

You can see a clear distinction between no-data that is represented as null and 0 as value in Instana.

To avoid gaps between the scale interval on the graph axis between Instana UI and Grafana UI in the Grafana dashboard that is caused by the null values, complete the following steps:

  1. In the Grafana UI, click Add > Visualization.
  2. Select null as zero from the Null value list.

Configuration

The Instana data source uses the Instana REST API to query the metric values.

After the plug-in is installed, you must configure the Instana data source plug-in. For more information, see Configuration.