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Grafana Cloud

Get started with metric forecasting and anomaly detection

This guide walks you through the procedure to create and view forecasts in Grafana Cloud.

Prerequisites

To create forecasts, you need the an Editor or Admin basic role.

Create a forecast

The following example uses a query to forecast and when you are predicted to go over your limits, or if an unexpected increase in metrics is likely to occur.

  1. Navigate to Alerts & IRM > Machine Learning > Metric Forecasts.
  2. Click + Metric Forecast.
  3. In the Query builder, choose Datasource grafanacloud-usage.
  4. Run the following query: sum(grafanacloud_instance_active_series).
  5. Click the Training Model tab and observe the tuneable knobs.
  6. Click Create.
  7. Name your forecast and click Confirm.

On the Forecasts page, your forecast is ready to generate predictions when the circle turns green.

View your forecast

  1. Click View on the Grafana Cloud Active Series forecast you created in the previous section.
  2. Change the view to an interesting time frame for your cast, by default the view is for this week.

Explore how the forecast matches your actual result, and be sure to include some days in the future to see how the model thinks your active series will evolve.

At the bottom of the screen, the UI displays your original query, as well as how you can query the forecast (grafanacloud_active_series:predicted) or actual(grafanacloud_active_series:actual) data. You can use these series to create panels or alerts.

Use the forecast in a panel

From the view page:

  1. Click the Copy as panel button in the upper right.
  2. Open an existing dashboard or create a new dashboard.
  3. At the top of the dashboard, click Add and select Paste panel from the dropdown.
  4. Edit the new panel and view the generated queries.

Use the forecast in an alert

  1. Click the Create Alert button from either the view page or the list page.
  2. In the Alert evaluation behavior section, choose a folder in which to save the alert.
  3. Tune the alert conditions and labels, if desired.
  4. Click Save or Save and exit to create the alert and navigate back to the previous page.

See Grafana Alerting for more information on alerting.