First of all, loving the hosted Grafana, especially the new log aggregator.
We use a bit of tracing (opentelemetry) with a basic Jaeger all-in-one setup but I’m keen to make this a bit more production-ready as managing Jaeger is a bit out of scope for our small team.
I know that Grafana already supports rendering traces:
and I’d like to get our tracing data visible here, either by using Jaeger’s backend or Tempo or one of the many other data warehouses for traces.
The issue is, there doesn’t seem to be any way to wire up connections on the Fly.io grafana instance. Is this possible via CLI or config or is it just not available. And if the latter, are there plans to open up hosted Grafana to more customer configuration options?
Hi @Southclaws, glad you’re enjoying the hosted Grafana!
You’re correct that configuring custom data sources on Fly Metrics is not available (we grant only Editor access to the hosted Grafana accounts, without permissions to modify the built-in data sources we provision). We’ve had several requests for this before.
There are a couple reasons we have this locked down, mostly around security and abuse-prevention, since Fly Metrics is a shared (multi-tenant) service and not running in individual isolated machines. We have some general concerns around allowing users to configure data sources with arbitrary HTTP endpoints that we would need to address before we could support custom data sources.
The current workaround is to run your own Grafana instance as a Fly app, which you could then customize however you like. That said, we know adding custom data sources to Fly Metrics would be more convenient (especially for extra context right alongside the existing platform metrics and logs), so this is definitely on our radar, though we don’t have an ETA if/when we can make it happen. I do appreciate the additional request which helps us prioritize.
