Can Grafana monitor endpoints? [closed]

Question

I have a REST API and I would like to check the health of specific endpoints. Can Grafana be used to monitor the health of specific endpoints? Any plugins that can be used for that? I know that it can be integrated with Zabbix, are there any other ways to do it? Any help would be great.

Answer 1

You can probably look at Prometheus blackbox exporter and use that to monitor the health of your endpoint.

https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter

Prometheus can then be added as a data source in Grafana and then Yes you have to first create a dashboard/panel if you want to use Grafana alerting capability.

Answer 2

That really depends what to monitor the health of specific endpoints means for you. Usually it is:

1. metric collecting: No, that is not a native task for Grafana. There was special Worldping plugin for Grafana https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/raintank-worldping-app, but that is deprecated. Usually your monitoring tool (Zabbix, Prometheus, Dynatrace, ...) is doing this.

2. metric visualization: Yes, this is the best task for Grafana. It can visualize metrics from supported time series databases/apps

3. alerting: Yes - but only in the graph panel, so there is overhead - you need to manage dashboards/panels for every single metric just to have alerting. Again, monitoring tools have usually better design for this task.

=> Use monitoring tools for monitoring and use Grafana just for the graphs.