Rebooting GraphMe

GraphMe was first launched in January. At that time, the idea was to be able to generate graphs from the most popular time series databases (Prometheus and Datadog at first) and post them in Slack. Another key feature was the ability to save common queries and reuse them easily.

After initial feedback, it became apparent that it was not intuitive which problem it solved, and what was the added value of it, especially compared to Grafana. After all, people where already putting their graphs and queries in Grafana.

I hence decided to rebuild the product and focus on integrating with Grafana only. It makes sense since Grafana is already connected to time series databases, and can act as a hub and proxy to them. The result is a much simpler bot focused only on querying Grafana, e.g.:

 /graph me service-health:requests 

The above query retrieves the dashboard whose slug (its name as it appears in the URL) is "service-health", and fetches the panels having "requests" in their name. Other syntaxes are possible, e.g., to target the 3rd panel of that same dashboard:

 /graph me service-health:3 

It also makes GraphMe much simpler to configure and to use. I also kept the idea of having aliases for common queries, e.g.:

/graph save as cpu
/graph me cpu

GraphMe is available today as an early release at: https://graphme.app/