One element of friction that Hosted Graphite has had for a while is that in order play with a dashboard, you actually need to send data.
While it might seem pretty obvious that you need to have data in a system before you can graph it, we thought that perhaps this was actually a pretty big ask for some users. We’re essentially asking you to give up some time to hook up a service or run a script, wait a minute and then dig into the dashboard options to see if you actually like it enough to use it on anything serious.
Test Data Streams
Well, we’re sorry, and we’ve added something that will make life a lot easier. We’re now including a test data stream with all accounts, so that as soon as you sign up you can begin testing graphite’s various functions and our advanced data views on live graphs and see whether these options work for you.
Interactive Grafana Guided Tour
In addition to that, we now have a fully interactive guided tour of Grafana which will walk you through the steps of creating a graph, adding and editing metrics, and playing with some of the advanced features.
You’ll find the Dashboard tour link in the main menu on the account home page.