Grafana, the most popular open-source analytics visualization tool is now
available on Azure as a managed service. With it, customers can run Grafana natively within the Azure cloud platform without needing to provision or managing the backend services needed to run it.
Why use Grafana?
With Grafana, users can bring together logs, traces, metrics, and other
disparate data from across an organization, regardless of where they are
stored. With Azure Managed Grafana, the Grafana dashboards our customers are familiar with are now integrated seamlessly with the services and security of Azure.
Features
Azure Managed Grafana is a fully managed service for analytics and monitoring solutions. It's supported by Grafana Enterprise, which provides extensible data visualizations. Quickly and easily deploy Grafana dashboards with built-in high availability and control access with Azure security.
Azure Managed Grafana also provides a rich set of built-in dashboards for various Azure Monitor features to help customers easily build new visualizations. For example, some features with built-in dashboards include Azure Monitor application insights, Azure Monitor container insights, Azure Monitor virtual machines insights, and Azure Monitor alerts.
How to get started
Getting started with Grafana on Azure is easy. Here are some links you should check:
Depending on your preconceptions, Vim may look exotic or sexy. Let's review
those assumptions and provide rational reasons to use this fantastic text
editor.
It may be possible that you heard about Vim. It may be possible that you didn't. Depending on your background, it may
even be possible that have preconceptions about it. On this post, let's try
to review all assumptions and provide concrete reasons to use this fantastic
text editor.
This article is an adaptation of another publication made by me on
Vim4us. I'm
re-publishing here to a wider audience with a few tweaks.
Vim is ubiquitous
Vim has been around for almost thirty years. Due to its simplicity, ubiquity and low resource requirements, it's the
preferred editor by sysadmins worldwide.
Easy to install
Vim is also easy to install on Windows and Macs and is packaged in most Linux
distros meaning that, even if it isn't installed in your system, Vim is one
line from the terminal and two clicks from your software manager.
Vim is lightweight
Differently from most editors, Vim is very lightweight. The installation
package is only 10 Mb and depending on your setup, memory consumption
reaches 20 Mb. Compare that with most text editors, especially the Electron-based editors like Visual Studio. Install size is not less than 200Mb, memory consumption
quickly 1Gb (50 times more!) while requiring 1.5Gb of storage, making it slow, even on modern hardware.
If you're running a Mac, a low end computer, a phone, or even a Raspberry Pi, Vim is definitely a good option for you.
Vim is stable
As previously said, Vim has been around for almost 30 years. And will probably
be for at two more decades. Learning Vim is an excellent investment as you
will be able to use your knowledge for the next two decades at least.
Vim works well with anything you want, as long as it's text. Vim works by
default with most file formats, has locales, can be localized, supports
eastern typography such as Arabic and Hebrew and comes with built-in support
(including highlighting) for most languages.
Vim respects your freedom
Vim does not contain any built-in telemetry. It's (unfortunately) common theses days the companies are abusing your
statistics in favor of improvements in their system.
Sysadmins trust that Vim will not be reaching the network to run ad-hoc
requests.
Vim is efficient
Vim is brilliant in how it optimizes your use of the keyboard. We'll talk
about that later but for now, understand that its combination of multiple
modes, motions, macros and other brilliant features makes it literally
light-years ahead of other text editors.
Thriving Ecosystem
Stop for a second and think about which feature you couldn't live without
today on your current text editor? The answer you probably be that Python or Go extension, meaning that what you'll miss is not actually about the
editor but about its ecosystem.
Vim has a brilliant ecosystem. You'll find thousands of extensions covering
anything you need. You can also host your extensions anywhere (on GitHub, for example) without being locked by any vendor. You could also host them
in private/corporate repos just for your team or share on public directories
like Vim Awesome.
Vim is ultra-customizable
Even if by default Vim has most of what you need, it's important to understand
that Vim lets you change pretty much everything. For example, you can make
temporary/local customizations (by using the Ex mode), permanent
customizations (by changing your .vimrc) or even customizations based
on file type.
Vim is always getting better
Vim is actively developed meaning that it keeps getting better. Vim users get security patches
and new features all the time. Vim is also updated to accommodate the latest
upgrades on modern operating systems while also supporting older systems too!
Learning how to learn Vim is the key to a continuous understanding of the tool
and not getting frustrated. There are many ways to get help on Vim: using its
built-in help system, using the man pages and obviously, accessing the
communities listed above.
Vim is free
These days it may be odd to say that Vim's free. Vim's freedom goes beyond its
price, but also your freedom to modify it to your needs and deploy it wherever
you want. Vim developers also have a strong commitment to helping needed people around the world.
GUI-less
Vim also runs GUI-less, meaning it runs on your terminal. So you get a full
featured text-editor on any system you're working on, regardless if it's a
local desktop or remote supercomputer. This feature is essential for sysadmins
and developers who often need to modify text files on remote machines trough
an SSH connection.
Rich out-of-the-box toolset
Vim comes with fantastic tooling by default: powerful search, regular
expression support, syntax highlighting, text sort, integrated terminal,
integrated file manager, cryptography, color schemes, plugin management
and much more. All without a single plugin installed!
Vim integrates into your workflow
Differently from other text editors which force you into their thing, Vim
adjusts seamlessly to your workflow via powerful customization, extension
support, integrated shell support and ability to pipe data
in/out from it.
Vim can be programmed
Want to go the extra mile? Vim also has its own language, called VimL. With it
you can create your own plugins and optimize even further the system to your
needs.
Vim will boost your productivity
There are multiple ways Vim will boost your productivity. First, Vim's
extensive use of the home row of the keyboard saves you from having to reach the arrow keys (or even worse, the
mouse) to do your work. Second, with Vim you can quickly create macros to
reproduce repetitive operations, third, the combination of motions, plugins,
custom shortcuts and shell integration will definitely boost your productivity
way more than you could imagine.
Vim will make you type better and faster
Being keyboard based, Vim's workflow based on the home row will definitely help force you to type
better. With Vim you'll realize that you probably move your hands way more
than you should and will significantly increase your typing speed.
Vim will make you learn more
Most editors these days do too much. Yes, part of that is imposed on us by
languages that require a lot of metadata (Java and C# for example). One problem with that is that you end up relying on the
text editor much more than you need. Without access to Eclipse or Visual Studio it may be possible that you'll feel the impostor syndrome.
With Vim, despite being able to, you'll feel closer to your
work, resulting in a better understanding of what you're doing. You'll also
realize that you will learn more and memorize better the contents of what
you're working on.
Conclusion
On this post we provided many tips why one should learn Vim. Vim is
stable, ubiquitous and is supported by an engaged, growing community. Given all its
features, Vim is definitely a good tool to learn now and harvest the benefits
for decades to come.
