thanks for the feedback. there's definitely a lot of validity to what you're saying, for what you describe.
grafana has traditionally been used for 'real time dashboarding and analytics' in the IT/devops world. that's the original use case, and its sweet spot, as you allude to.
but, since the beginning, the mission of the open source grafana project has had nothing to do with IT per se. it was about democratizing metrics; helping teams understand their 'systems', by breaking down silos between databases and people.
over the last few years, interesting things are afoot in grafana community. we're seeing grafana used for more and more non-IT use cases. it's being deployed in the industrial and business worlds. about 10-20% of the grafana community now deal with things that have nothing to do with IT/devops.
the 'systems' are no longer limited to things like servers, switches, containers and clusters. these emerging users deal with things like temperature sensors, dollars, robots and ambulances. we are making progress in bringing grafana to these worlds, while also ideally improving it overall.
there's tangential threads in various stages of recent completeness (none of which solve your specific issue admittedly). things like sql support, general focus on ad-hoc analysis with ('explore'), the upcoming abstraction around being able to better use ui components within grafana ('grafana/ui'), improved support for tabular data, new panels, etc.
sorry about the four year old issue; i'd be lying if i said there weren't myriad things we'd like to do, that don't make the cut not due to desire but due to time and resources.
again, thanks for the feedback, please know that we're very interested in continuing to develop and improve grafana for use cases like yours!
-r
[disclosure, very biased and opinionated response. am co-founder/ceo at grafana labs. lucky enough to work with torkel and the team on making grafana better]
Thanks for the response and for a pretty cool open source project! Sorry my comment dumping on it ended up being the top of the thread here. FWIW, I definitely had a nicer time trying out Grafana than I ever have fighting with Kibana, and I definitely liked that I was able to use it with SQL based datasources rather than just Elastic.
grafana has traditionally been used for 'real time dashboarding and analytics' in the IT/devops world. that's the original use case, and its sweet spot, as you allude to.
but, since the beginning, the mission of the open source grafana project has had nothing to do with IT per se. it was about democratizing metrics; helping teams understand their 'systems', by breaking down silos between databases and people.
over the last few years, interesting things are afoot in grafana community. we're seeing grafana used for more and more non-IT use cases. it's being deployed in the industrial and business worlds. about 10-20% of the grafana community now deal with things that have nothing to do with IT/devops.
the 'systems' are no longer limited to things like servers, switches, containers and clusters. these emerging users deal with things like temperature sensors, dollars, robots and ambulances. we are making progress in bringing grafana to these worlds, while also ideally improving it overall.
there's tangential threads in various stages of recent completeness (none of which solve your specific issue admittedly). things like sql support, general focus on ad-hoc analysis with ('explore'), the upcoming abstraction around being able to better use ui components within grafana ('grafana/ui'), improved support for tabular data, new panels, etc.
sorry about the four year old issue; i'd be lying if i said there weren't myriad things we'd like to do, that don't make the cut not due to desire but due to time and resources.
again, thanks for the feedback, please know that we're very interested in continuing to develop and improve grafana for use cases like yours!
-r
[disclosure, very biased and opinionated response. am co-founder/ceo at grafana labs. lucky enough to work with torkel and the team on making grafana better]