ADR-016: Grafana for Business Process Monitoring and Data Visualization
Status: Accepted
Date: 2025-09-06
Authors: Entirius Development Team
Reviewers: Architecture Team
Grafana with Prometheus/InfluxDB is adopted as the business process monitoring and data visualization platform for Entirius. This industry-standard solution provides real-time dashboards, comprehensive alerting, and data-driven insights for operational excellence.
# Access Grafana web interface
http://localhost:3000 (admin/admin)
# Import dashboard
curl -X POST http://admin:admin@localhost:3000/api/dashboards/db \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d @dashboard.json
- Business KPIs: Order volumes, revenue trends, conversion rates
- System Health: API response times, database performance, error rates
- User Activity: Active users, session duration, feature usage
- Process Monitoring: Workflow completion rates, automation success
- Infrastructure: Server metrics, resource utilization, capacity planning
- PostgreSQL: Business metrics from application database
- Prometheus: System and application metrics
- InfluxDB: Time-series business events and custom metrics
- API Endpoints: Real-time data from Django services
- Log Files: Application logs and error tracking
The Entirius e-commerce platform generates significant volumes of business events and metrics from various processes including order processing, product management, user interactions, and AI-powered features. To maintain operational excellence and make data-driven decisions, we need a comprehensive solution for:
- Real-time monitoring of business process metrics
- Visualization of key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Alerting on critical business events
- Historical data analysis and trending
- Dashboard creation for different stakeholders (developers, business analysts, management)
Current challenges:
- Scattered monitoring across different services without centralized visibility
- Limited ability to correlate business metrics with technical performance
- Manual effort required to extract insights from raw event data
- Lack of real-time alerting on business process anomalies
- Description: Use Grafana as visualization layer with Prometheus for metrics collection and InfluxDB for time-series data storage
- Pros:
- Industry-standard solution with extensive plugin ecosystem
- Excellent visualization capabilities and dashboard flexibility
- Strong community support and documentation
- Native support for multiple data sources
- Advanced alerting capabilities
- Cost-effective (open source)
- Cons:
- Requires setup and maintenance of multiple components
- Learning curve for complex dashboard creation
- Impact on system: Minimal impact, operates as separate monitoring layer
- Description: Build internal dashboard using Django/React stack matching existing technology
- Pros:
- Full control over features and customization
- Integrated with existing authentication and authorization
- No external dependencies
- Cons:
- Significant development effort required
- Maintenance overhead
- Limited visualization capabilities compared to specialized tools
- Reinventing existing solutions
- Impact on system: High development cost, diverts resources from core features
- Description: Use cloud-native monitoring and analytics services
- Pros:
- Managed service with minimal setup
- Scalable and reliable infrastructure
- Integration with cloud services
- Cons:
- Vendor lock-in concerns
- Higher operational costs
- Limited customization options
- Data residency and privacy concerns
- Impact on system: Dependency on external cloud providers
Chosen option: Grafana with Prometheus/InfluxDB
Key decision factors:
Industry standard: Grafana is the proven leader for metrics visualization with extensive ecosystem and community support
Flexible data integration: Supports multiple data sources including PostgreSQL, APIs, and time-series databases for comprehensive monitoring
Rich visualization capabilities: Advanced dashboard features with multiple chart types, annotations, drill-downs, and custom panels
Advanced alerting: Built-in alerting system with multiple notification channels for proactive incident response
Risk analysis: Low technical risk with mature platform, extensive documentation, and proven scalability
Business impact: Real-time visibility into business processes enables data-driven decisions and faster issue resolution
Compatibility: Excellent integration with n8n workflows (ADR-014) for automated monitoring and response capabilities
Reduction in mean time to detection (MTTD) for business process issues
Increased stakeholder satisfaction with data visibility and reporting
Number of business insights discovered through dashboard analysis
Successful integration with at least 3 core business processes within first quarter
95% uptime for monitoring infrastructure
Team adoption measured by active dashboard usage