From a basic RedisTimeSeries data source to 2 million downloads in Grafana Marketplace

The Redis Data Source for Grafana was released two years ago to solve the specific problem. Most Redis tools allow working with a single Redis instance in a separate application and do not provide a complete view of the hardware and software stack.

The Redis Data Source and Application plugins were built on the backend platform introduced in Grafana 7 and became a part of the “Big Tent” philosophy. Starting from supporting RedisTimeSeries, a Redis time-series module, plugins were extended over the years to support native Redis types, Streams, RedisGraph, RedisJSON, RedisGears, etc.

The Redis plugins for Grafana let you connect Grafana to Redis to visualize more types of data in more ways than otherwise would be possible. All the increased functionality comes with a more streamlined workflow. You can read more in the Grafana blog.

New plugins connect almost all of Redis for monitoring and visualization in Grafana

200M Ops/sec Observability challenge

My Redis observability journey started with the 200M Ops/sec challenge, topped with Nail Sirazitdinov while I was working at Redis. We accomplished this performance testing with limited visibility provided by Redis Enterprise Web UI and collected Prometheus metrics. This was the moment we realized there was room for improvement.

Redis Enterprise Extends Linear Scalability with 200Mops/sec @

During my years at Redis, I started developing various internal tools and demo applications, spending extra time building observability components to monitor Redis Streams, RediSearch indexes, and data sets following the approach to building Observability first application.

Redis Application provides Application pages and custom panels for Redis Data Source.

The Redis plugins and demo applications can be downloaded from the GitHub organization RedisGrafana.

RedisGrafana

Benchmarking NLP pipelines

It’s essential to monitor CPU, Memory usage, network, and other system metrics, but to operate Redis clusters at scale, it’s crucial to understand what kind of Application data is stored. Together with Alex Mikhalev from Applied Knowledge Systems, we created custom dashboards to benchmark NLP pipelines.

To fight ever-increasing complexity, “The Pattern” projects help find relevant knowledge using Artificial Intelligence and novel UX elements, all powered by Redis — new generation real-time data fabric turned into knowledge fabric

You can learn more about the project in the GitHub repository.

GitHub - applied-knowledge-systems/the-pattern: Overall repository for NLP pipeline, API and UI…

To monitor multiple Redis cluster nodes, we added Redis data sources for each instance and the RedisGraph database using the Redis Application plugin. Custom application pages allow managing Redis data sources effortlessly.

Redis Application plugin allows managing multiple Redis Data Sources.

The created custom dashboard provides information on various system and application data metrics:

• CPU Usage, Number of keys, Memory Usage for each Redis cluster node.
• A number of RedisGraph nodes and edges. RedisGraph can be readily displayed using the Node Graph panel in real-time.
• RedisGears Memory Usage and Registration information — number of triggers, success, and failed executions.
• Pending elements in the Redis Stream (queue) to ensure equal load between nodes.

A Custom system-wide dashboard to benchmark NLP pipelines.

Starting from a simple idea implemented using Grafana as a platform, Redis plugins for Grafana have become the most practical tool for monitoring Redis used by companies worldwide.

Real-time data streaming

I am proud of everything we achieved. Astonishingly, Redis plugins for Grafana were the first community plugins to support real-time data streaming. We created one-of-a-kind Redis CLI, RedisGears Script editor, Latency, and CPU panels, to mention a few.

Redis Latency and CPU panels allow observing Redis instances in real-time.

The Redis Data Source 2.1.1, Redis Application 2.2.1, and Redis Explorer 2.1.1 were published in January 2022. Those are the last releases maintained by Volkov Labs.

Redis Application

Volkov Labs is an agency founded by long-time Grafana contributor Mikhail Volkov. Check out the latest plugins and projects at https://volkovlabs.io and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

All our Grafana plugins are open-source and we constantly adding new plugins to our Portfolio. If you enjoy using our plugins please consider sponsoring our work on GitHub.