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Getting Started with Chronograf
Let's get familiar with some of Chronograf's main features. In the next sections, we'll show you how Chronograf makes the monitoring and alerting for your infrastructure easy to configure and maintain.
If you haven't installed Chronograf check out the Installation Guide.
Host List
The HOST LIST page is essentially Chronograf's home page.
It lists every host that is sending Telegraf data to your InfluxDB instance as well a some information about each host's CPU usage, load, and configured apps.
The Chronograf instance shown above is connected to three hosts (telegraf-region-neverland, telegraf-region-narnia, and telegraf-region-howardsend).
The first host is using 9.96% of its total CPU and has a load of 0.15.
It has two configured apps: system and processes.
Apps are Telegraf input plugins that have dashboard templates in Chronograf.
Click on the app on the HOST LIST page to access its dashboard template.
The dashboard offers pre-canned graphs of the input's data that are currently in InfluxDB.
Here's the dashboard template for Telegraf's system stats input plugin:
Notice that you can hover over the graphs to get additional information about the data, and you select alternative time ranges for the graphs by using the time selector in the top right corner.
See the README for a complete list of the apps supported by Chronograf.
Data Explorer
Chronograf's Data Explorer gives you the tools to dig in and create personalized visualizations of your data.
Use the query builder to easily generate InfluxQL queries and create beautiful visualizations:
You can also view those same query results in tabular format (1), easily alter the query's time range with the time range selector (2), and save your graphs in individual exploration sessions (3):
Create and View Alerts
Chronograf also offers a UI for generating Kapacitor alerting rules and viewing those alerts as they occur.
Create an Alert Rule
Easily create a Kapacitor alert rule on the KAPACITOR RULES page.
Access the KAPACITOR RULES page by hovering over the third item in the left navigation menu and selecting Rules.
Then, click on the Add New Rule button to create a new alert rule.
The example rule shown below operates on data from Telegraf's system stats input plugin and sends a simple threshold alert to Slack:
The Select a Time Series section includes an InfluxQL query builder which allows you to specify the target data for the alert rule.
The example shown above is working with the system stat's usage_idle field in the cpu measurement.
The Values section defines the alert rule.
It supports three rule types:
- Threshold Rule - alert if the data cross a boundary
- Relative Rule - alert if the data change relative to the data in a different time range
- Deadman Rule - alert if no data are received for the specified time range
The example above creates a simple threshold rule that sends an alert when usage_idle values are less than 86% within the past minute.
Notice that the graph provides a preview of the target data and the configured rule boundary.
Lastly, the Alert Message section allows you to personalize the alert message and select an alert endpoint.
The rule shown above sends alert messages to a Slack channel.
Here's an example of the alert messages in Slack:
Currently, Chronograf supports the following alert endpoints: HipChat, PagerDuty, Sensu, Slack, SMTP, Telegram, and VictorOps.
You can configure your alert endpoints on the CONFIGURE KAPACITOR page.
View all Active Alerts
See all active alerts on the ALERTING page, and filter them by Name,
Level, and Host:
