Observability with Grafana and Eyer
Tags: grafana, observability, aiops, ai
Published: 2024-06-22 10:57:48

Modern infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex, with microservices, cloud deployments, and distributed architectures making it challenging to understand how everything functions together. This complexity has begged the need for the unparalleled visibility that observability promises.

Observability provides a comprehensive view of your system, allowing you to identify issues before they escalate. Tools like Eyer play a crucial role in achieving observability. Eyer helps gather and analyze system data, revealing anomalies, affected nodes, and potential future problems. With this insight, you can quickly pinpoint issues using Eyer, leading to less downtime and a smoother user experience.

However, the raw data from Eyer might be difficult for non-technical individuals or teams to understand. This is where [Grafana](https://grafana.com/) comes in. As a powerful visualization tool, Grafana transforms this data into clear and insightful dashboards, making it accessible to everyone who needs it.

This article explores Eyer, its importance in modern observability discussions, and the added value of integrating it with Grafana.


## Understanding Eyer and its capabilities

Eyer is an AI-powered observability tool that provides insights into your Boomi integrations. [Boomi](http://boomi.com/) has become an integration superpower, uniting diverse applications and data sources with its simple and intuitive drag-and-drop design. With Eyer, you can take that impeccable user experience to the next level.

By [installing and using the Eyer connector](https://customer.support.eyer.ai/servicedesk/customer/portal/1/article/30015491), you can collect data from your Boomi integrations, send it to the Eyer machine learning pipeline, and gain insights into what's wrong with your Boomi process. 

The machine learning pipeline learns the user Boomi Atom’s behavior and establishes what normal behavior or baselines are for your Atom. So, any significant and prolonged deviations from the normal behavior are flagged. 

For example, if your Boomi Atom is using more memory than normal or CPU utilization is higher than usual, the Eyer connector will send you a JSON alert. You can choose to receive this alert conveniently via email or even as a file saved directly on your host machine, thanks to the flexibility of Boomi's connectors.

JSON format alerts are advantageous for many reasons: they are structured, human-readable, lightweight, language-agnostic, and can be easily integrated into various systems for automated processing and response. However, while JSON alerts do not have inherent visualization capabilities, tools like Grafana lend them the ability to visualize data over time.


## Grafana: The solution to all your visualization problems

[Grafana](https://grafana.com/) is an open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application tool used to monitor application performance. This section explores how Grafana allows Eyer users to query, visualize, and understand their JSON alerts.


### Benefits of the Grafana integration with Eyer

By integrating Grafana with Eyer, developers have access to powerful visualization capabilities. Some key benefits of this integration include:

**Visualization**: If you only remember one thing from this article, remember that Grafana is the king of data visualization. This visualization is amazing for democratizing data use. Visual representation allows users to quickly understand the data and see patterns and trends that might be missed when looking at raw JSON. 

**Historical analysis**: Another powerful feature of Grafana is its ability to store and visualize historical alert data.  Imagine trying to understand a month's worth of system activity by manually reviewing individual JSON alerts; this gets tiring quickly.  Grafana offers a much better solution.  By aggregating all the data for a specific metric into a single graph, you can easily see trends over days, weeks, or months.  This historical view allows you to identify potential issues, forecast future resource needs, and gain insights into long-term performance patterns.

**Collaboration and sharing**: Grafana makes it easy to share dashboards and visualizations with team members. That way, more people can watch and understand what's happening in your systems. These shared insights make it easier for teams to work effectively to address and resolve issues.

**Open-source, extensible**: As an open-source tool, Grafana is free to use and allows users to access and modify the source code, enabling customization to meet specific needs. Its extensibility is one of its core strengths, with a vast ecosystem of plugins available that extend its functionality, including integrations with a wide range of data sources, custom visualizations, and alerting mechanisms. This flexibility makes Grafana adaptable to various use cases and industries.

**Large community support:**  Grafana benefits from a large and active community of users and developers. This community support is invaluable, providing a wealth of shared knowledge, tutorials, forums, and plugins. The collaborative nature of the community ensures continuous improvements and updates, keeping Grafana at the forefront of monitoring and visualization tools. This robust support network also means that users can easily find help and resources to solve problems and optimize their platform use.

**Integrating Eyer with Grafana:** In addition to being easy to use, one of the things that makes Eyer stand out is its clear documentation. To learn how to integrate Eyer with Grafana, check out the [Grafana section](https://customer.support.eyer.ai/servicedesk/customer/topic/4a74722a-1bf5-46d8-8b40-6352ecd62cfb) on the [Eyer documentation](https://customer.support.eyer.ai/servicedesk/customer/portals).


## Summing it up

The more complex modern infrastructure becomes, the more visibility you need to ensure that these infrastructures do not collapse underneath its own complexity.  Observability tools like Eyer give you this visibility. With Eyer acting as a watchdog over your processes and Boomi integrations, you can sleep well at night knowing that if something is about to or does go wrong, you will be alerted immediately.

Eyer's strengths are elevated even further with the integration of visualization tools like Grafana, which translates these Eyer JSON into clear dashboards. These dashboards allow you to see, at a glance, the health of your Boomi integrations. 

 With Grafana visualizations, you can quickly identify trends, predict potential problems, and troubleshoot issues. In short, Eyer and Grafana working together provide you with the comprehensive visibility you need to ensure the smooth operation of your complex modern infrastructure, giving you peace of mind and allowing you to focus on more strategic initiatives.

To gain AI-powered insights and visualization for your Boomi integration, check the [Eyer website](https://eyer.ai/) and join the [Discord community](https://discord.gg/gjTfhHTvBt) for more information and support.