DigitalOceanDigitalOcean gains new insight with Grafana visualizations
DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider headquartered in New York City that provisions virtual servers and provides cloud services to help developers deploy and scale applications that run on multiple computers simultaneously. DigitalOcean is the second-largest hosting company in the world in terms of web-facing computers.
Multiple teams with visualization needs
The challenge:
Many teams across DigitalOcean were actively using disparate metric visualization tools. Some were antiquated in-house graphing solutions, others were technically complex to use, while still another was racking up bills in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. They needed a solution to ease all of these pain points.
The solution:
Utilizing Grafana as the consolidated time-series metrics visualization and dashboarding solution allowed multiple teams throughout the organization to take advantage of the same tool. DigitalOcean’s support team can now easily share graph snapshots with customers, and the platform team can quickly pull metrics for any server, thanks to the integrated Prometheus data source. They also eliminated hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost by off-loading their metric storage.
Grafana produces beautiful graphs we can send to our customers, works with our Chef deployment process, and is all hosted in-house.
David Byrd, Product Manager, DigitalOcean
Building and sharing
beautiful graphs easily
DigitalOcean’s support team had been using a 3-year-old, in-house graphing tool which left a lot to be desired. As a design-forward company, they were embarrassed to email screenshots diagnosing server usage to customers. They decided to try the free version of New Relic on their hypervisors just for the pretty graphs.
Meanwhile, the Engineering teams were loving Prometheus, but the complicated query language created a high learning curve before anyone could pull useful visualizations from the data.
Next, an invoice for hundreds of thousands of dollars from New Relic arrived. Even though DigitalOcean was using their free version, the huge amount of data generated was not free to store. Finding a solution that allowed them to store their own graphs and metrics was imperative.
The largest unexpected benefit of adopting Grafana is that it empowers so many other teams to create dashboards with the data.
David Byrd, Product Manager, DigitalOcean
Democratizing metrics
Grafana was a natural fit. The close integration with Prometheus allowed for new dashboards to be built quickly, and it became easy for support and platform teams to pull up visual metrics for any server in the fleet. With Grafana’s intuitive UI, powerful query editor, and beautiful visualizations, teams throughout the company are building dashboards and sharing data. Everyone at DigitalOcean benefits because graphs from every team can be viewed in one place.
