Grafana Faro is a web SDK that may be customised to instrument web applications and gather observability data. Logs, faults, and performance metrics are automatically gathered, and optional metadata can be added to the metrics. A Grafana Agent can then transfer the data to the designated backend datastore, such as Prometheus, after being set to do so by Grafana Faro.
Grafana unveiled two new tools for observability and monitoring during the most recent ObservabilityCon. An open source web SDK for real user monitoring (RUM) of browser frontend applications is called Grafana Faro. An open source backend database for storing and querying profiling data is called Grafana Phlare. Additionally featured is a new flame graph panel that makes it simpler to visualise and analyse the gathered profile data.
A Grafana Agent instance set up with the app-agent-receiver block is required before configuring Faro. Data collection is possible by including the configuration block in the source code of the application after the Grafana Faro Web SDK has been set up and initialised.
Grafana’s new Frontend Application Observability solution, which is now in private beta, was also announced. The Frontend Application Observability Collector in Grafana Cloud will receive the data gathered by the Grafana Faro Web SDK. The processed and saved logs and traces from the data collection will subsequently be used for analysis in the Grafana Cloud instance.
For storing and retrieving profiling data, Grafana Phlare offers an open source (GNU Affero General Public License v3.0) backend. Profiling data can help with performance and cost optimization by helping to better understand how a programme uses resources. Grafana Phlare saves profiling data as time-series data in object storage, enabling visualisation of changes over time.
Both a data source plugin for Parca, another open-source profiling database, and a Grafana data source plugin for Phlare are included in the release. These two new data sources are in addition to the Pyroscope plugin that has previously been made available. The Agent uses the root block scrape configs to push and scrape profiles for Grafana Phlare configuration. A single Agent scrape configuration is represented by each scrape config block. By default, profiles are retrieved through HTTP every 10 seconds without a timeout.
