Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

May 2021

Why choose the Connect license for SquaredUp SCOM dashboards?

Every enterprise has its arsenal of tech tools to tackle an array of different challenges. If you’re using SquaredUp for SCOM, you already have the best dashboard for SCOM data – but what if you could track all the metrics from all your tools on a single dashboard? Typically, to get the full picture of your infrastructure, you need the right toolset to connect to Web API, a SQL database, or through other means.

Turn your home office into a NOC room with Philips Hue and Grafana

I recently got a couple of Philips Hue Play lights to spice up my home office setup, and after a bit of tinkering with the APIs, I decided it would be a fun project to create my own personal NOC room, using them to visualize the status of some system I’m monitoring.

The future of Prometheus remote write

At PromCon last month, Tom Wilkie, Grafana Labs VP of Product, described the origin and purpose of Prometheus remote write and previewed exciting developments on the road map. “We covered our efforts to standardize remote write, document how it works and why it works that way, and then test implementations,” Wilkie said. “In the next release or two of Prometheus, we’ll improve how we send metadata via remote write and start sending exemplars.

Is SquaredUp Dashboard Server the effortless alternative to Grafana?

Grafana is free and powerful - a mainstay in DevOps and IT dashboarding. It’s an open-source visualization platform that lets you visualize data in real-time from a variety of data sources. SquaredUp Dashboard Server is, at first glance, quite similar! You can dashboard just about any data to get real-time visualizations. All for free.

Is SquaredUp Dashboard Server an easy alternative to Grafana?

Grafana is free and powerful - a mainstay in DevOps and IT dashboarding. It’s an open-source visualization platform that lets you visualize data in real-time from almost any database. SquaredUp Dashboard Server is, at first glance, quite similar! You can dashboard just about any data to get real-time visualizations. All for free. So… The answer is… Yes, if you want enterprise scale dashboards hosted on Windows Server that are super-fast to set up (and usable by anyone).

How one mobile company is using Grafana Enterprise for billing system observability and beyond

Calling or texting with a mobile phone may seem like a simple process, but behind the scenes, network providers are engaged in a constant exchange of transactions to pay each other for connecting their customers. If telecom companies don’t stay on top of the data and billing, they could be surprised with their own big bills at the end of each month. Cosmote, the largest mobile network in Greece, handles the challenge by using Grafana Enterprise.

Visualize HAProxy Metrics with InfluxDB

HAProxy generates over a hundred metrics to give you a nearly real-time view of the state of your load balancers and the services they proxy, but to get the most from this data, you need a way to visualize it. InfluxData’s InfluxDB suite of applications takes the many discrete data points that make up HAProxy metrics and turns them into time-series data, which is then collected and graphed, giving you insight into the workings of your systems and services.

Kristina Robinson | Understand and Visualize Your Data with InfluxDB Cloud | InfluxDays EMEA 2021

Learn how you as a developer can use our InfluxDB Cloud web interface to ingest, explore, analyze, and understand your data. We highlight new capabilities and show you some tips and tricks to get the most out of the InfluxDB Cloud Platform.

New plugins connect almost all of Redis for monitoring and visualization in Grafana

Mikhail Volkov is building observability and monitoring solutions at Volkov Labs and leading Redis plugins for Grafana. Since the Redis project first got underway in 2009, the open source in-memory data store has been embraced by thousands of companies of all types and sizes. According to Stackshare.io, well over 5,000 companies use Redis, including Uber, Airbnb, Twitter, Instagram, and Slack.

Create powerful data visualizations with the new Datadog dashboards experience

Dashboards are a crucial tool in your monitoring arsenal, as they allow you to visualize and correlate telemetry data from across your stack in a single place. Historically, Datadog offered two dashboard types: Screenboards, for pixel-level control on a canvas, and Timeboards, for troubleshooting a specific point in time. Now, we’re excited to introduce a new dashboard layout that combines the best of Timeboards and Screenboards in a single, seamless editing experience.

What's new in the updated Strava plugin for Grafana

Grafana dashboards are often used to monitor a company’s metrics, but what about using them to monitor yourself? That was the thinking behind our creation of the Strava plugin back in early 2020. Strava is a service that allows athletes to track and analyze their workouts and training sessions. It’s widely used for activities such as running and cycling.

Easily monitor and alert on your Kubernetes clusters with the new Grafana Cloud integration

Today we’re excited to introduce the Kubernetes integration for Grafana Cloud, our composable observability platform bringing together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. Grafana Cloud users can now easily monitor and alert on core Kubernetes cluster metrics using the Grafana Agent, our lightweight observability data collector optimized for sending metric, log, and trace data to Grafana Cloud.

How a CIO dashboard helps you run IT like a business

Today’s business demands that IT transform from a cost center to an innovation engine. To foster a business mindset, IT leaders need full visibility into operations so they can achieve desired business outcomes. At ServiceNow, we run IT like a business to deliver value quickly, improve productivity, and create great user experiences. The CIO Dashboard is one of the capabilities our IT leadership uses daily to advance business outcomes that help us scale.

Monitor your production line with the new Grafana Enterprise data source plugin for SAP HANA

Greetings! This is Abdelkrim from the Solutions Engineering team, and I am with Sriram from the Enterprise Plugin team. We both joined Grafana Labs in February this year, and we already have some stories to share with you. I came to Grafana Labs from a big data and analytics background, and I witnessed a lot of companies storing monitoring and performance data in all kinds of analytics platforms (data lakes, data warehouses, cloud, etc.).

2 reasons you need Dashboard Server with SquaredUp Connect or EAM

We’ve seen how much you love SquaredUp. But we’re also aware that opening up access to your SCOM and Azure data can sometimes hold you back from sharing the joy of powerful dashboarding with other teams. And what about trying to get an overview of multiple SCOM management groups without having to log into each one individually? We have the perfect solution for both problems.

How to correlate Graphite metrics and Loki logs

Grafana Explore makes correlating metrics and logs easy. Prometheus queries are automatically transformed into Loki queries . And we will be extending this feature in Grafana 8.0 to support smooth logs correlation not only from Prometheus, but also from Graphite metrics. Prometheus and Loki have almost the same query syntax, so transforming between them is very natural. However, Graphite syntax for queries is different, and in order to map it to Loki, some extra setup is required.

New Dashboard Builder Now Available to Circonus Customers

We recently announced the development of our new dashboard builder and associated release of several new turnkey service dashboards. The new dashboard builder provides a vastly improved user experience, enabling users to create dashboards in a fraction of the time it took them previously. As of this month, the dashboard builder, which was previously only accessible internally, is now available to all Circonus customers.

Speed up your dashboard workflow with dynamic template variable syntax

Template variables enable you to use tags to filter your Datadog dashboards to the hosts, containers, or services you need for faster troubleshooting. However, there are some cases where it may be difficult to use a standard set of template variables to aggregate all of the data you need without creating a complicated, difficult to manage set of variables. For example, you may use tag values that are a subset of another tag.

How shuffle sharding in Cortex leads to better scalability and more isolation for Prometheus

For many years, it has been possible to scale Cortex clusters to hundreds of replicas. The relatively simple Dynamo-style replication relies on quorum consistency for reads and writes. But as such, more than a single replica failure can lead to an outage for all tenants. Shuffle sharding solves that issue by automatically picking a random “replica set” for each tenant, allowing you to isolate tenants and reduce the chance of an outage.

Dashboard Server: Working with the Elasticsearch Tile

I’ll come clean and admit it – this part of the series will be a bit interesting given the fact that I know very little about Elasticsearch. So really, this is an honest test of the question – “can I still build something good with Dashboard Server even if I only have nominal knowledge of the tool where the data is sourced from?”

New: Dashboard Server Enterprise version

In April, we brought you the ability to dashboard any data with the new SquaredUp Dashboard Server product – for free. Then at SquaredUp Live, we announced the launch of Dashboard Server Enterprise for enterprise organizations who have got to grips with their dashboarding and now want to scale up. You can purchase unlimited named users and get endless data connections plus new, enterprise integrations that let you dashboard just about anything.

The Grafana Enterprise Stack in less than 3 minutes

Grafana Labs is the open & composable observability company. In just over 6 years, our namesake product, Grafana, has become the world's #1 dashboarding service for time series data with over 6 million users. And we've been recognized as a leader in the space. Grafana Labs has built the world's first open & composable observability stack -- and it's natively designed for monitoring hybrid-cloud, container, and microservices environments.

New Features: Heroku Errors and a Magic Dashboard

We have been collecting Logplex data for our Heroku customers for a while now. With that data we create Magic Dashboards for Postgres and Redis integrations, and track Heroku Host Metrics. Starting today, we also extract error incidents from Heroku Logplex data and provide you with a magic dashboard for Heroku status codes.

Unravel the hidden mysteries of your cluster with the new Kubernetes Dashboards

One of the greatest challenges you may face when creating Kubernetes dashboards is getting the full picture of your cluster. Kubernetes is the de-facto standard for container orchestration, but it also has a very steep learning curve. We, at Sysdig, use Kubernetes ourselves, and also help hundreds of customers dealing with their clusters every day. We are happy to share all that expertise with you in the Kubernetes Dashboards.

How to search logs in Loki without worrying about the case

Whether it’s during an incident to find the root cause of the problem or during development to troubleshoot what your code is doing, at some point you’ll have an issue that requires you to search for the proverbial needle in your haystack of logs. Loki’s main use case is to search logs within your system. The best way to do this is to use LogQL’s line filters. However, most operators are case sensitive.

Creating a Business Process and adding it to Dashboard

In this blogpost I will introduce, how to create a business process from monitored hosts and services and how to add them to dashboards. Business Process module is an interesting module in Icinga Web 2. It allows you to visualise and monitor hierarchical business processes based on any or all objects monitored by Icinga. We can create custom business process and trigger notifications at process or sub-process level.

Get started with distributed tracing and Grafana Tempo using foobar, a demo written in Python

Daniel is a Site Reliability Engineer at k6.io. He’s especially interested in observability, distributed systems, and open source. During his free time, he helps maintain Grafana Tempo, an easy-to-use, high-scale distributed tracing backend. Distributed tracing is a way to track the path of requests through the application. It’s especially useful when you’re working on a microservice architecture.