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Comment by phildougherty | Hacker News Reader

I think the most useful feature in Grafana for me has been Templating. It's really powerful and works well in an AutoScaling environment where things come and go. with graphite-web it would be a fight to keep the graphs collecting the right data points, or updating them if your hostname scheme changes, etc.

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In an autoscaling environment, you just need to keep your metric paths consistent. Then all you need is wildcard queries. E.g., CPU userspace cycles on all your instances should be like:

    provider.region.vpc.group.instance-id.os.cpu.user

E.g.:

    aws.us-west-1.prod.web-front.i-4df567a9.os.cpu.user

Then wildcard queries will provide you aggregate stats at any level you like.

It's really a feature of how Graphite queries work.

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All that being said, I agree that Grafana is pretty awesome.

That's true. I guess what I prefer about doing it in Grafana is that the interface for managing complex graphs with overlays of different metrics, and ones using wildcards to match groups of metrics is just way easier.

I use it heavily as well to create generic dashboards for looking at clusters/sites, etc. Its a shame kibana4 nerf'd templating :|

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