November 30, 2022 — 3 min read
Grafana Dashboards
We recently started developing a collection of Grafana Dashboards to provide visibility into both the health of your Flipt deployment and the state of the evaluation system.
In Flipt v1.16.0 we have made some alterations to the metrics that we expose. This includes some measurement naming changes, along with the addition of some new ones, specifically around the evaluation engine.
These new dashboards depend on the names and new metrics added in v1.16.0. Upgrading to this version is a requirement before attempting to use these new dashboards. Metrics are exposed as Prometheus-style metrics. Our dashboards have been developed against a target Prometheus instance. See configuring metrics for documentation on configuring metrics in Flipt.
Currently, there are two separate dashboards—one for system overview and the other for flag evaluation state.
Flipt System is the name of the system dashboard. It includes operational details of Flipt, including RPC request throughput, response codes, and latency, as well as details relating to interactions with the backing SQL database.
Flipt Flag Evaluations dashboard includes details specific to each flag. Selecting a specific flag will present historical details on the resulting matches, match reasons, segments, and values produced.
The system dashboard is more focused on operators trying to understand the health of a Flipt deployment, whereas the evaluations dashboard is focused on Flipt users who want to understand what Flipt is returning and why. It is critical as an end user of a feature flag system to understand how your flags are being evaluated in a production context so that you can answer questions like "Is my flag being referenced?", "Is it safe to delete this flag yet?" or "How often is variant A returned compared with variant B?".
This is our first pass at building reusable dashboards for Flipt. Our dashboards are open-source and we invite anyone who would like to contribute and improve them. We intend to keep them maintained and preserve a level of compatibility going forward with respect to measurement naming.
Head to our Grafana dashboards repository to try them out or contribute.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to us on Discord or Twitter.
Cheers and happy graphing 📈!
