Grafana In AST
The Application Study Tool leverages Grafana for visualization of all collected metrics stored in prometheus.
The instance is pre-configured with dashboards built by the AST team to provide insights into the fleet of BigIP devices being monitored. Grafana is a flexible visualization tool, and AST users are encouraged to customize the ‘out of the box’ dashboards or build new views around the AST data that suit your specific organization’s workflows.
Configure Grafana Settings
The Grafana instance within the Application Study Tool (AST) can be easily configured using environment variables, following the standard Grafana configuration options. This flexibility allows you to tailor your Grafana setup to meet your specific requirements (e.g. authentication integration, TLS, and other settings required)
Passing Environment Variables To The Instance
The included docker-compose file looks for a .env file at the root of the project directory and will mount that at start time. Variables can be added / modified here, or in the docker-compose file directly using the standard docker-compose syntax for container environment
$ cat .env-example
# Grafana Environment Variables
# These should be updated to more secure values outside of testing environments.
GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_USER=admin
GF_SECURITY_ADMIN_PASSWORD=admin
$ cp .env-example .env
$ vi .env
Modify Grafana Views
The AST team will maintain a set of dashboards that cover a wide variety of use-cases, but for needs that have less broad applicability or to suit particular tastes (e.g. bar-chart vs pie-chart), users are encouraged to modify or create new views into the AST data.
By default, all dashboards within an AST instance are open to editing directly via the ui. Follow the instructions from grafana for building or editing dashboards, visualizations, etc.
Save Grafana Views Outside Docker Volume
Saving a dashboard view in the Grafana UI will write it to the docker volume for persistence across container restarts. In order to persist dashboards outside the docker environment, you can export them as JSON following these instructions.
You can save dashboard files under /services/grafana/provisioning/dashboards from the project root to automatically load them when the container is started.