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Welcome to MONIT provided Grafana service

As part of the central Monitoring service (MONIT), we run a central Grafana instance based on the Openssource version of Grafana. This instance is open for everyone with a lightweight account and structured into different organizations so service managers have a way to customize their experience and thus of their users.

Please note that we don't support custom installation of plugins by the users and we take fully care of updating Grafana versions when we see it's the time to do it, so using this service you will end up in a fixed Grafana version with a set of plugins that you won't be able to change by yourself.

MONIT Grafana deployment

In order to ensure high availability for the service, the central monit-grafana instance runs several hosts split between the Meyrin and the Prevessin data centres.

There is also an open version, aimed to publicly share certain dashboards without the need for authentication, this is based on the OPEN organization in the main Grafana instance and only selected people are allowed to put their dashboards there.

MONIT Grafana upgrades

Every once in a while the MONIT Grafana service is upgraded. As rule of thumb we stay away from fresh versions (e.g. X.Y.0) and upgrade when the first bugfix version is available (e.g. X.Y.1).

Nevertheless, this is susceptible to the service's status. For instance a security event or a big discovered bug may trigger a forceful upgrade.

Procedure

This information only refers to major upgrades (e.g. X.Y to X+1.Z), minor upgrades are not included since they are always backward compatible.

The following procedure was developed so users can still benefit from their unofficial plugins and remain able to fix any incompatibility against the new Grafana version.

  • Grafana upgrades are announced with at least 1-month notice;
  • On the day of announcement a temporary (monit-grafana-new.cern.ch) instance is enabled so users can already identify issues to work on
  • On the scheduled day the Grafana service is upgraded and monit-grafana-new instance is stopped;
  • A temporary Grafana (monit-grafana-old.cern.ch) is enabled running the previous release;
  • The Grafana old endpoint is maintained for the period of 1 month;
  • Users are expected to solve any conflicts with the main Grafana version during this period;
  • Once the period is over the Grafana old endpoint is discontinued;

MONIT Grafana Plugins

All official plugins are maintained by the MONIT team. Meaning that with every upgrade the team tests and assures all official plugins are working.

The MONIT team is however not responsible for the maintenance of unofficial plugins. If an unofficial plugin breaks with an upgrade, it's up to the teams using the plugin to fix it or replace it by a new one.