[New Webinar] Grafana 101 Part II: Getting Started with Alerts

Jumpstart your monitoring journey with step-by-step demos, queries, and pro tips that’ll get you set up with custom notifications for incidents in your systems, so you can take action immediately.

In the first session of our Grafana 101 series, we showed you how to create awesome visualizations to gain insight into real-time performance of your systems, including gauges to track thresholds, single stats to show cache-hit ratios, and more.

But, what happens when things go wrong? When something crashes, you’re consuming too much memory, there’s an outage, or users report performance degradation, you need to know about it and take action ASAP.

In Guide to Grafana 101 Part II: Getting Started with Alerts I’ll take you from zero to hero in using Grafana to get notified about anomalies, dig into root causes, notify the right teams, and respond to critical issues.

• RSVP to join me on May 20th at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 4pm GMT.

Grafana isn’t only for creating (awesome) visualizations

While there are many monitoring systems, Grafana is a great choice. It supports data sources like PostgreSQL, Prometheus, AWS CloudWatch, and many other popular services, and integrates with the communication tools your team already uses (including Slack, OpsGenie, email, and PagerDuty). It’s also open source, making it a popular choice for developers looking for something that’s flexible and cost-effective.

Getting setup with alerting can be tricky business. You want to balance alerting on the right metrics and quickly notifying your team, with keeping false-positives down and ensuring you don’t give others notification fatigue.

What you’ll learn

As always, I’ll focus on code and step-by-step live demos.

We’ll use a scenario where we want to monitor our production database (something we often hear from Timescale customers). I’ll take you through creating and setting alerts based on different rules, like: averages over a period of time, ranges and thresholds – and how to close the loop and send alerts to our team in real-time.

More specifically, you’ll:

• Get an understanding of how alerts work in Grafana
• See how to define key metrics for your scenario and apply them to Grafana’s alerting capabilities*
• Walkthrough example queries for graphing key metrics and triggering your alerts
• Define different alerting rules for specific metrics, including uptime/downtime, average CPU, memory consumption, and total disk usage
• Setup and receive alerts via various notification channels, like Slack and OpsGenie

* (we’ll use metrics critical to monitoring a database, but you may be monitoring a website, Kubernetes cluster, or a larger infrastructure system).

Whether you’ve never used Grafana and are looking for a cheaper alternative to proprietary monitoring tools, or are a Grafana pro who’s looking to level up your alerting skills, this session is for you.

My goal is that you leave the session with an understanding of when, why, and how to use Grafana alerts and the resources you need to integrate them into your own monitoring setup.

I hope to see you there – but signup even if you’re unable to attend live. I’ll make sure you receive the recording, slides, and resources, as well as answer any questions you have along the way.

Myself and other Timescale team experts will be available to answer questions throughout the session (we received 30+ last time!), and share ample resources and technical documentation.

See you soon!