Hi! I work on the Grafana OSS team. We added some more export options recently (dashboards have a big Export button at the top right; panels can export their data via the panel menu / Inspect / Data), try it on our demo page: https://play.grafana.org/d/000000003/graphite3a-sample-websi...
Could you describe your use case around "exportable to any code" a bit more?
> I've used Grafonnet before for doing Grafana at scale. Simply put, I hate it. Apparently an alternative is being worked on at Grafana so I'm waiting for that. But if you need to make hundreds of panels....it works well enough.
Hi, I run the Grafana team at Grafana Labs. I'd love to learn more about your Grafonnet use to help us build something better. I'm david at grafana com
General usability. DataDog is intuitive and easy. Grafana is rough and requires a solid understanding of statistics and data analytics. The bar for using it is pretty high, so most engineers I know push it to someone else, which means there's one team doing the toil and working on creating simpler abstractions to hide the complexity.
I/We are using the latest 7.3.0 with Prometheus, however most of the issues are more general. I think they'd be hard to prioritize as they are so minor (outside of perhaps a "minor bugs only" sprint or similar, as some projects do). But they do add up very quickly.
To illustrate, here's some of the paper cuts that instantly come to mind: mod-s not working in panel editor, gradient fill incompatible with series overrides, various missing tooltips, missing query error reporting and syntax highlighting in variable editor, variable editor needing many clicks for most common actions, hidden variables can only be changed by repeatedly opening and closing the settings, some dashboard settings pages being easy to accidentally close without saving, g+[key] keyboard shortcuts randomly not working, random scroll jumps with multiple queries in a panel, switching between cursor modes with mod+o is super slow, Prometheus autocomplete not working when editing existing queries, clicking the dashboard name filters by folder while clicking the folder name shows all dashboards, adhoc filters silently don't work, etc.
The "not responding" one specifically happens a lot while editing queries. It'll randomly decide to evaluate the query while I'm typing, get thousands of results and lock up.
Oh man "random scroll jumps with multiple queries in a panel" that just hit me so hard, it drives me absolutely insane. I've now learned to stop using the mouse when navigating through the query text. Also annoying with the graph panel, when you apply a series override and want to change it later, you have to navigate the whole way to the setting again to change it. Makes you lose so much time just to try out some new colors for example.
can you report an issue on github for this and how to replicate? We have no reports of this scroll jumping and that sounds super annoying and something we want to fix asap.
Ryan (mentioned in the article) is building a team around this (non-timeseries data, sensors data, manufacturing). Head to our hiring page if you want to join his R&D team (US-remote).
It’s literally my job to keep Grafana real. Our budding UX team is getting a lot of training on SRE as a discipline and we run weekly internal UX feedback sessions where all of engineering can join and course-correct. Same with weekly feedback sessions with our existing user base. Get in touch with david at grafana if you’d like to participate.
Director of UX here. This year we rewrote a lot of the data flow plumbing in grafana to allow streaming with the very goal to enable sensor and other high frequency use cases. More to come soon
How much of those improvements is in current versions of Grafana? I've tried building some dashboards in Chronograf for some data I work with, but there's a lot of sensors that update very quickly so the graphs basically killed the browser tab. If Grafana is better at handling that sort of use case I'll definitely check it out.
Director of UX here. We’re trying to find a way to have a graphical builder for simple queries. But anything with binary operators is a UI challenge that will be text based for a while. We’re testing the waters with a graphical LogQL builder for Loki first. Watch this space.
Could you describe your use case around "exportable to any code" a bit more?