Blog

Grafana creator Torkel Ödegaard takes us through the development of user experience, from the beginning of the project to what’s coming next.

Loki and Grafana are a perfect match. The backend is kept lean and space-efficient, while the user interface allows ad-hoc field parsing and simple statistics. This post details some of the UX goals we had to deliver logs simpler and faster.

Pie charts have been a popular feature request for Grafana, both on our GitHub as well as at conferences and customer meetings. We’ll hear things like “We love Grafana, but we need pie charts for the business guys to use it”, usually accompanied by an eye roll or sigh. We agree. Pie charts are terrible, but they have such a bad rap because people constantly use them incorrectly. We find ourselves having long conversations exploring the vice and virtue of the lowly pie chart, and here’s our perspective.

I’ve been conducting a series of chats with UX professionals in the Open Source community with the intention of publishing their perspectives and methods. My first chat was with the UX Lead at a very popular config management company. Unfortunately, he never got back to me with approval, so I’ll refer to him as an anonymous source. I can say that the company described in this post is one I’ve admired for a long time, and has been doing exciting things for several years.

Torkel and the rest of the team have been hard at work on the next generation of Grafana, which is the foundation for what we’re building here at raintank. We’re really excited about the many new features and capabilites that Grafana 2.0 brings to the table, but they all have big implications from a UI/UX perspective. Our first task at raintank in a post-capacity world was clear: make sure that new functionality didn’t negatively impact the UI/UX.