Variables support, Prometheus data source, and alert history in Business Intelligence 1.6.0

We are excited to announce the release of the Business Intelligence, version 1.6.0. It accumulates massive functionality enhancements and, thus, marks an important milestone in transitioning from a POC (proof of concept) to a development type of release.

The Business Intelligence, version 1.6.0 includes the following updates:

• Allowed Variables support.
• Added Support for Prometheus data source.
• Enabled Prometheus monitoring.
• Extended UI functionality.
• Added Alert History.

Business Intelligence 1.6.0 for Grafana.

Variables Support

Supporting dashboard variables greatly simplifies work with configuring the alerting in general. Let's say, you have two very similar devices and your task is to monitor their technical health by creating alerts in the event of an alert rule breach.

Your alert rules are almost identical for both devices with only thresholds being slightly different. For instance, the CPU usage of one device must stay within the 0 to 2 percent range and the other CPU usage can go over 2%.

Without dashboard variables, you have to create two separate alert rules. For a small number of devices, this approach is reasonable. However, it turns into a severe headache once instead of two devices you need to maintain hundreds. For every device, you will have to create and maintain a separate alert rule containing an identical query.

With dashboard variables enabled, creating one alert rule is enough. The thresholds could be configured in the Overrides.

Here is an example of the Time Series visualization where one data series triggers an alert and another does not.

An example of the Time Series visualization where one data series triggers an alert and another does not.

Below is what the configuration of the alert rule using dashboard variables looks like.

With variables, the same alert rule can have multiple thresholds.

Prometheus Data Source

At this stage, we ensured that the BI App supports the variables in Prometheus Data Source. Some data source has unique support for the variables and we plan to support the most popular of them in the future.

Enabled Prometheus Monitoring

In this release, we added a Prometheus middleware and container to allow the collection of the BI Engine system health statistics. Having Prometheus monitoring built-in in the BI App allows you to monitor the alerting system itself. Being an outside system, the BI App is an excellent choice for observing the observability system while using the familiar interface.

Following the enabling of the Prometheus monitoring, we crafted a ready-to-use, out-of-the-box dashboard with all necessary metrics for kick-off the successful monitoring.

Built-in BI Engine monitoring dashboard. Data collected and stored via Prometheus.

The BI Engine consists of two components which provides metrics:

• API Server - Instance engine:3001
• Scheduler - Instance engine:3002

API Server and Scheduler are two components of the BI App.

Alert rules workflow

The below schema illustrates the conceptual workflow from the user point of view. Prometheus serves to collect all system health-related and other data to ensure troubleshooting and reporting on system behavior.

Conceptual workflow from the user POV.

Extended UI functionality

Actions

To align with the alerting basics terminology Alert rule-Alert record-Alert action, we renamed the Webhooks tab into the Actions tab.

Annotations

In the Edit mode->Action category->Add annotations parameter, now you can specify whether you need to attach them to a panel or a dashboard (i.e. all panels of the specified dashboard).

The Alerting panel and the Edit alert drawer.

Alert details

For the alert rules in the Alerting and Error statuses, we added the Event Details category.

To review, click the Details button on an alert card, then Event Details header.

Event details for the alert rules in the Alerting and Error statuses.

Alert History

We added a new option to the Request parameter of the Business Intelligence Engine data source. It allows you to display alert history in a visualization panel of your choice.

In the example below, the alert history is displayed in the Table visualization panel.

New request type, Alerts History, allows to display.

Getting Started

You can download the latest release from our GitHub repository and follow this hands-on tutorial.

Metrics, Logs, CPU Usage with Business Alerting in Grafana.

Docker Compose

The docker-compose.yml file consists of the following containers:

• Grafana includes the provisioned BI Engine data source, an Alerting panel, and dashboards.
• Timescale is required to store configuration, events, rules, etc.
• BI Engine has a service account key to access Grafana HTTP APIs. It evaluates alert rules and calls webhooks when alert statuses change.
• JSON webhook is a webhook example based on NodeJS, which accepts alert payload and saves it to the files for testing purposes.
• Prometheus collects and store performance metrics from BI Engine.

docker-compose.yml

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Start

When you run a docker-compose file, it launches the Grafana, Timescale, BI Engine, Prometheus and Webhook containers:

docker compose pull && docker compose up

Stop

Stop and remove all containers:

docker compose down

Release Notes

Features / Enhancements in 1.6.0

• Update BI App and BI Engine (#11)
• [App] Update Prometheus dashboard.
• [App] Make repeated variable is multi and add all option.
• [App] Add Group Statuses.
• [Engine] Add execution batching.
• [Engine] Add running migrations only via server app.
• [Engine] Skip creating annotations for repeat variables without results.
• [Engine] Update Production scripts.

Features / Enhancements in 1.5.0

• [App] Add Prometheus dashboard.
• [App] Add showing load variables error.
• [App] Add check for creating alerts without variable values.
• [App] Update to Grafana Utils 1.2.0.
• [Engine] Create mapper service to convert entities.
• [Engine] Add Prometheus middleware.
• [Engine] Add failing load variables request if unable to query variable options.
• [Engine] Add redirect support for Home dashboard.
• [Engine] Add prometheus datasource for getting variable options.
• [Engine] Update the License Key.
• [Engine] Update to Node 20.

Features / Enhancements in 1.4.0

• Update BI App and BI Engine (#10)
• [App] Add Variables support.
• [App] Add Grafana proxy requests.
• [App] Update Dashboard annotation modes.
• [App] Add License Info tab.
• [App] Add Evaluation overrides.
• [Engine] Add Alert State to created Annotations.
• [Engine] Add Variables support.
• [Engine] Modules refactoring.
• [Engine] Add Grafana proxy for App requests.
• [Engine] Update alert checksum.
• [Engine] Update Dashboard annotations.
• [Engine] Add Configurable grafana request timeout.
• [Engine] Add License Info.
• [Engine] Add Alert history.
• [Engine] Add Evaluation overrides.

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