Recently I got the chance to attend a PromQL training conducted by Julius Volz, the co-founder of Prometheus, and in this post I am going to share some of the key takeaways from my experience.
In my last blog post, we focused on creating 29 Enterprise Applications (EA). We also spent some time talking about our Critical Service Offerings (CSO) and Supporting Service Offerings (SSO). And finally, we looked at three out-of-box dashboards. If all you needed was to create a dashboard to control the boxes’ color quickly, you already have what you need.
January 20, 15:01 UTC. I was sitting in my home office, watching the screen and feeling a mix of emotion and nostalgia as a pod was getting terminated. We have thousands of pods, continuously starting and terminating, and I’m definitely not spending my days watching them, so why was this one special? The terminating ingester-0 pod was the very last Cortex ingester running on chunks storage in Grafana Labs’ infrastructure.
In this blogpost, I explain how to create dashlets using custom filters. This way you can create dashlets of your own which you find is necessary. Having dashboards in fact improves monitoring. Dashlets are the different sections under the given dashboard, which are the snapshots of some monitoring views and are defined by a name. Requirements: Icinga 2 and Icinga Web 2 installed.
As part of my job as a tech evangelist and a pre-sales engineer here at SquaredUp, I often find myself talking to a lot of people. And understandably, when you as a consumer are trying to evaluate a product that you may potentially invest in, it’s only natural that you want to compare different products and decide which one’s better and/or offers more value for money and why.
The Raspberry Pi is a popular and inexpensive device that comes in many shapes and forms. It’s a popular hobbyist tool that is generally purchased to run all kinds of software experiments on. But make no mistake, even though a Raspberry Pi comes in a tiny form factor, it’s a fully functional computer!
We are thrilled to announce that among our other big plans for 2021, we have migrated and upgraded our much-loved Community Answers platform! It is now a lot easier to connect with the rest of the monitoring community and get the answers you are looking for.
In my position, I get to work with a wide variety of organizations that each have a different level of monitoring maturity. But I’ve noticed an emerging pattern that I’ll call the ‘Critical Service Offering’ or ‘Executive Level Status’ dashboard. At their most basic level, these dashboards should communicate the current health of the application, provide some historical context and, most importantly, not be tied to infrastructure monitoring.
In my position, I get to work with a wide variety of organizations that each have a different level of monitoring maturity. But I’ve noticed an emerging pattern that I’ll call the ‘Critical Service Offering’ or ‘Executive Level Status’ dashboard. At their most basic level, these dashboards should communicate the current health of the application, provide some historical context and, most importantly, not be tied to infrastructure monitoring.
Are you putting the final touches on your plugin before you submit it to the Grafana plugin page? In this article, I’ll share a few tips for how to add that extra polish to your plugins. This article assumes that you already have some knowledge of building plugins for Grafana. If you’re looking to build your first plugin, start by following one of our plugin tutorials.
Yup – we've now got a health explorer for Azure VMs! Health Explorer… now why does that sound familiar? You’ve probably guessed it by now, but here’s another hint: Hmm…now where have I seen that before? Right – in SCOM!
Want to create a map of where your users are? With the GeoIP processor, you can easily attach the location of your users to your user metrics. Right out of the box, Kibana can map this traffic immediately by country or country subdivision: Plus, the new User Experience app for Elastic APM automatically creates maps based on monitoring data: But what if you want to take this one step further and create maps with different regions?
Data visualization is a simple presentation of data or information in a graphical format. Humans are naturally drawn to colors and patterns and these tools make it easier for people to interpret and understand data. Numbers are complex and they can be difficult to understand conceptually. Whereas, data visualization or pictorial representation can spark an interest in your audience to listen and learn more from your presentation.
Three years ago, Tom Wilkie and Frederic Branczyk sketched out the idea for Prometheus monitoring mixins. This is a jsonnet-based package format for grouping and distributing logically related Grafana dashboards with Prometheus alerts and rules. The premise was that the observability world needed a way for system authors to not only emit metrics, but also provide guidance on how to use those metrics to monitor their systems properly.
Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started observing metrics, logs, traces, and dashboards. When we say “easiest,” we mean it: Grafana Cloud is designed so that even novice observability users can use it. As a new user, you are not required to dive into the complexity of setting up Prometheus and figuring out how to create Grafana dashboards from scratch. Integrations are the reason why.
Oftentimes users of open source are told to go download it and figure it out… or pay for a managed solution in the cloud. So the typical choice is free and do-it-yourself or expensive and easy. With our new changes to Grafana Cloud, we are making it both free and easy to have a real, composable observability solution.
So you’ve now finally finished putting all the pieces together – transitioned to Azure, deployed resources, deployed applications, got familiar with Azure Monitor and set up all the monitoring. You’re now collecting all the monitoring, application performance and security data for your Azure resources in Log Analytics workspaces, ready for analysis. (Head over to our Azure Monitor Learning Path if you're still figuring out how to do all that.) But is only the collection enough?
Welcome to 2021, a year we are all entering full of hope. None of us knows quite what 2021 holds in store with regards to the global pandemic, but no doubt it will be another year of huge change. That will mean continued pressure on IT organizations across all industries to adapt and deliver new services to the business and users, all while keeping costs as low as possible. As we start a new year, many of you reading this will be considering your monitoring strategy in 2021 and beyond.
If you’ve been using SquaredUp for Azure, you’re familiar with its abilities to treat Azure native virtual machines . You can create a number of amazing and useful visualizations with them, such as displaying their health state, performance charts, costs, and so on. This is all excellent and super useful, but one question we frequently get asked is: how do I do these things with my on-prem servers that I’ve connected to Azure Monitor?
Smart State Technology (SST) is a company based in the Netherlands that develops advanced technological and future-proof solutions for smart grids. Their mission is to reinforce critical energy infrastructures by providing innovative energy solutions that connect industry and research, while ensuring society can fully benefit a sustainable energy future.
Happy New Year everyone! We are thrilled to be starting 2021 with some exciting news. Come February 2nd, we’ll be kicking off Azure Management Talk, a bite-sized webinar series with a focus on all things Azure management. Azure is fast-evolving, and often, it can get quite complicated. With so many things to learn and not enough time, the huge swathes of learning resources available online can quickly get overwhelming.
In 2014, the Mazia (Matsch) research site in the Italian Alps was officially accepted as a Long Term Socio Ecological Research LT(S)ER site. The monitoring infrastructure is operated by Eurac Research and the University of Bolzano and consists of 24 automatic microclimatic stations in a mountain ecosystem across an elevation gradient ranging from 1,000 m to 2,700 m, logging several meteorological and biophysical variables every 15 minutes.
One of the keys to CloudWatch’s success is its no bang, no buck billing system. The pricing structure has been designed from the outset to ensure that CloudWatch users only pay for what they actually use. In addition, the CloudWatch Free Tier allows first time users to test the waters without shelling out. The downside of this flexibility and adaptability is complexity.
