The Basics

Learn Signal Analog by doing. Signal Analog is a tool for generating SignalFx dashboards. It’s a Nike open source project on GitHub. My team is migrating from New Relic to SignalFx, and we have opted to use Signal Analog to create our SignalFx resources.

Installation

I ran these commands to add the signal_analog package to my project.

mkdir learn-signal-analog
cd learn-signal-analog
printf 'signal_analog' > requirements.txt
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Creating a Dashboard

Let the fun begin. I decided to start by creating a grouped dashboard with this example. The dashboards.py file was added to my learning-signal-analog directory. I then narrowed the code down to represent a single dashboard.

Up went the code…

./dashboards.py --api-key <MyApiAccessToken> create

In the UI for SignalFx, the working token is labeled API Access Token

Token UI

This is what success looks like.

{
  "authorizedWriters": {
    "teams": [],
    "users": []
  },
  "created": 1590460991067,
  "creator": "EYyXD0gA0AA",
  "dashboardConfigs": [
    {
      "configId": "EY58mxKAwAA",
      "dashboardId": "EY58lP0A0AA",
      "descriptionOverride": null,
      "filtersOverride": null,
      "nameOverride": null
    }
  ],
  "dashboards": [
    "EY58lP0A0AA"
  ],
  "description": "",
  "email": null,
  "id": "EY56poZA4AA",
  "lastUpdated": 1590460992006,
  "lastUpdatedBy": "EYyXD0gA0AA",
  "name": "Learn Signal Analog",
  "teams": []
}

The dashboard is present within the dashboard group upon creation.

I then made the dashboard more useful by removing the Network chart and adding a Postgresql query time chart.

Dashboard

Signal Analog is an excellent Python module that provides an infrastructure as code option for SignalFx.

Learn Signal Analog - Beyond The Basics