Integrating Grafana panels with ASM via the Apica Panels feature is a good way of providing up to date, easily digestible information using the same data for multiple purposes. You can define visualizations to suit many different needs at various levels of detail.

Perspectives

For operational purposes, you can create panels to display an overview of all monitored applications and services. This allows for early detection and mitigation of network problems or performance issues,

When working with maintenance, panels provide a at-a-glance information on the impact of current issues or infrastructure changes.

From the business perspective, panels can be used to provide insights into the performance and stability, allowing for efficient follow up for improvements.

Examples of Panels Usage

Analysis

Data collected can be presented in various formats to enable analysis of the results. Different visualizations of the same data can be displayed in different formats to allow for deeper analysis of performance issues or improvement needs. For example, Map Heatmap can provide insights into result frequencies over time, and Histogram can show the distribution of result values.

Benchmarking

You can use Panels dashboards to provide quick overviews of monitoring data for benchmarking purposes. You can create dashboards to display how how your applications fare compared against industry standard metrics. If you have access to competitor estimates or actual data, you can use that to provide a visual comparison with your own results.

Check Status

At any given time, the current status of single checks or groups of checks can provide useful insights. For example, you can use charts displaying the current status for checks as immediate fault detection, and/or to view details about checks, such as returned metrics and other information.

Geographical Overview

Monitoring data displayed on a map can give a geographical overview of the monitoring data. For example, using monitoring results collected from multiple locations, you can create a geographical overview on account or group level.

KPI

Visualizations can be used to display monitoring data to analyze impact on KPI. For example, you can use your current or historical results for availability and performance or you can track them and review impact on your business KPI goals and targets.

Locations

Data from multiple locations can be compared side-by-side. For example, as checks are run from multiple locations, data can be collected and displayed in the same visualization, providing comparisons of application performance by user location.

Operational Status

Panel dashboards can provide information on a higher level for operational monitoring and strategy decisions. For example, on the account level, visualizations can be used to display aggregated data for the account, or whole application stacks.

Recent Results

Visualizations of shorter and more recent time periods provide quick access to anomaly detection. For example, you can create dashboards showing monitoring data from recent shorter time periods, allowing you to view and detect problems with results as they come in.

Trend

Displaying monitoring results for longer time periods can show information about trends or seasonal differences in performance. For example, displaying longer time sequences provides trend views which allow you to quickly identify performance changes during particular time periods or discover time-dependent fluctuations in performance.

User Journey

Monitoring data can be used in sequence to provide process performance visualizations. For example, using multiple panels in sequence for various parts of your application can be used to track the performance of user journeys and particular use cases.