Outdated Docs on Grafana data sources after removal of bundled Grafana
Problem to solve
Improve our documentation in regard to the guidelines on how one can use Grafana and the available Data Sources to use.
Tracked MRs will go below.
Further details
In 16.3, we removed Grafana bundled.
The current documentation lists options of how to proceed with external Grafana Labs.
It's not too clear what alternatives users have, so far in regard to Data Sources. Grafana docs list options such as Grafana Agent, GitLab Data Source and Prometheus Data source but all are not too direct.
Options on our docs:
1.) Import GitLab dashboards - These Dashboards are outdated, even listing unicorn in most json configs. They could either be updated or removed completely.
"tableColumn": "",
"targets": [
{
"expr": "avg(up{job=\"gitlab-unicorn\"})",
"format": "time_series",
"intervalFactor": 2,
"legendFormat": "",
"refId": "A"
}
MR to resolve this - !147342 (merged)
2.) Integrate with GitLab UI - This is an option when one already has Data Source included. This step is hanging as it should be after a number of configurations have been set up in Grafana then do this.
3.) Switch to new Grafana instance - You can import old dashboards then export into your external Grafana instance. Is a Data Source still needed here?
4.) "Prometheus as a Grafana data source" - This method works but needs some adjustments.
- this method needs to be updated as step 4 mentions "Add your Prometheus listen address as the URL, and set access to Browser.", but access to Browser type was removed and is no longer supported.
In Prometheus, browser access mode was deprecated in Grafana 7.4.0 and removed in 9.2.0. If you used this mode, please switch to server access mode on the datasource configuration page.
An example error when connecting using our documented step:
Get "https://REDACTED:9090/api/v1/query?query=1%2B1&time=4": http: server gave HTTP response to HTTPS client - There was an error returned querying the Prometheus API.
5.) Remove mention of grafana in this section of "Standalone Prometheus using the Linux package". Users who come across this section will enable bundled Grafana while it is deprecated and removed.
Proposal
Leverage what Grafana has documented to use.
- Does the Grafana Agent work? Note that it requires an enterprise version of Grafana.
- There's an option for GitLab Data Source documented in Grafana. @alvin noted that this has the limitation on software related metrics only e.g audit events but not hardware related e.f CPU usage.