Case Study: Stack Overflow achieves faster, self-service monitoring dashboards with Grafana

How Stack Overflow uses Grafana to Optimize their Systems

Stack Overflow, the developer community and careers platform, needed a better way to build self-service dashboards across multiple monitoring systems. Using Grafana, they wanted to give developers and SREs an easier way to visualize data from OpenTSDB, Elasticsearch, and their alerting tools in one place, beyond the limits of their existing Opserver dashboards.

Grafana helped Stack Overflow create fast, flexible custom dashboards and even visualize Bosun alerting data through a new Grafana plugin built by the team. This improved visibility into latency-sensitive systems like their ad server, helped surface alerts and context directly alongside metrics, and reduced the need to switch between tools. The Bosun plugin was later shared with the wider community and has been installed thousands of times.

Stack Overflow

Kyle Brandt

Director, Site Reliability