Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2021

Get control back into the Control Room

This article explains how SquaredUp for SCOM leverages the true power of the SCOM platform: the SCOM object model. I believe in dashboarding you need simplicity and granularity all in one. Simplicity for your Control Room, which gives clear and quick insight. Granularity and detail for your system management engineers to be able to drill-down into details and find that Root-Cause quickly.

Dashboard Fridays: Sample Azure DevOps Dashboard

Join SquaredUp's Adam Kinniburgh and Azure expert Shaswot Subedi as they showcase this example Azure DevOps Dashboard. This dashboard uses SquaredUp’s WebAPI tile and data from Azure DevOps to give our DevOps Team the performance overview of our build and release pipelines that they always wanted. Tune in to learn how it was made, the challenges it solves, and our experts top tips for building it yourself.

"Open source done right": Why Canonical adopted Grafana, Loki, and Grafana Agent for their new stack

Michele Mancioppi is a product manager at Canonical with responsibility for observability and Java. He is the architect of the new system of Charmed Operators for observability known as LMA2. Jon Seager is an engineering director at Canonical with responsibility for Juju, the Charmed Operator Framework, and a number of Charmed Operator development teams which operate across different software flavors including observability, data platform, MLOps, identity, and more.

How Changelog monitors and optimizes website performance with Grafana Cloud

Developers around the world get their news from Changelog, an indie media company on a mission to create inspiring content for software developers. Through their popular podcasts, including The Changelog, Go Time, JS Party, and Ship It!, the team at Changelog helps listeners stay up-to-date on the latest happenings, trends, and tools in a constantly evolving industry.

Improve your on-call experience with Datadog mobile dashboard widgets

Life happens—even when you’re on-call. You can’t take your laptop everywhere, but whether you’re on the train, at dinner, or at the gym, you can count on the Datadog mobile app for access to key data about the status and performance of your applications. Now, you can use Datadog mobile widgets to build an on-call mobile dashboard directly on your phone’s home screen, so it’s even easier to track the data you care about from anywhere.

Learn how to build interactive dashboards with Netdata Cloud for troubleshooting systems

This video will show you how to build new dashboards with key metrics from any number of distributed systems in one place for a bird's eye view of your infrastructure. Create more meaningful visualizations for troubleshooting or keep a watchful eye on your infrastructure's most meaningful metrics without moving from node to node. Netdata’s free, open-source monitoring agent works with Netdata Cloud to help you monitor and troubleshoot every layer of your systems to find weaknesses before they turn into outages.

What's new in Grafana Cloud for October 2021: Machine Learning, Grafana 8.2, new integrations, and more

Here at Grafana Labs, we’re constantly shipping new features to help our users get the most out of Grafana Cloud. To help our new and existing customers learn about the latest and greatest, here’s a roundup of all the new features and improvements you should know about to make the most of Grafana Cloud.

Configuring Kibana for OAuth

Kibana is the most popular open-source analytics and visualization platform designed to offer faster and better insights into your data. It is a visual interface tool that allows you to explore, visualize, and build a dashboard over the log data massed in Elasticsearch clusters. An Elasticsearch cluster contains many moving parts. These clusters need modern authentication mechanisms and they require security controls to be configured to prevent unauthorized access.

How to monitor a Ceph cluster using Grafana Cloud

Here at Grafana Labs, when we’re building integrations for Grafana Cloud, we’re often thinking about how to help users get started on their observability journeys. We like to focus some of our attention on the different technologies you might come across along the way. That way, we can share our tips on the best ways to interact with them while you’re using Grafana products.

Why your log management software may not give you the real Dashboard experience

Visualizing log data is one of the biggest perks of using good log management software. Data is many businesses’ most critical asset. But, without proper use, a business’ data becomes just an artifact and no longer an asset. Visualization and analysis are the end goals of collating log data from their sources. The need for visualization arises from the fact that we intuitively process visual information faster than a random jumble of numbers and letters.

Grafana EMEA meetup recap: accessibility, k6 testing, and multi-DC observability stacks

On Oct. 5, we hosted the first Grafana Virtual Meetup for an EMEA-based audience. Each Grafana meetup features “bite-sized” presentations from our user community and members of the Grafana Labs team. We want to provide opportunities (even virtually!) for members of our community to connect with one another and share what they’re working on or have learned.

Three reasons to upgrade to SquaredUp SCOM Edition

If your organization uses SCOM, you are sitting on a treasure trove of juicy data. Wouldn’t it be a dream to be able to effortlessly leverage all that data via a native integration? You can easily do that with the SCOM Edition of our SquaredUp dashboarding suite. If you are using our free Community Edition at the moment, here are three reasons you should upgrade to SCOM Edition if you are dashboarding SCOM: Let’s break it down.

How we're building a production readiness review process at Grafana Labs

Production readiness review (PRR) is a process that originated at Google, described as the first step of site reliability engineering engagement in the company’s famous SRE book. The idea of thoroughly reviewing a product before handing over the pager is a really good one, but except for Google-scale companies, there aren’t that many organizations that can afford dedicated SRE teams.

New in Grafana 8.2: Test contact points for alerts before they fire

Grafana 8.2 was released last week, and we’re excited to announce one of its new features: contact point testing. Now users of Grafana 8 alerting can test their contact points right from the contact points page. This feature makes it easier to configure Grafana 8 alerting and gives you the confidence in knowing that your contact points are working as expected before they fire. Here are the basics.

Making data accessible with sound, a Grafana Labs Hackathon project by Kostas Pelelis

We learned from a visually impaired astronomer that it was possible to use sonification to understand astronomical spectra. So during a hackathon at Grafana Labs we decided to turn time series into audio, and add sound to our alerting systems too. Kostas Pelelis is a Software Engineer at Grafana Labs living in Greece.

Bootstrapping a multi DC cloud native observability stack by Bram Vogelaar

An introduction to Observability and how to setup a highly available monitoring platform, across multiple data centers. During this talk we investigate how to config a monitoring setup across 2 DCs using Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Alertmanager and Grafana. Bram Vogelaar spent the first part of his career as a Molecular Biologist, he then moved on to supporting his peers by building tools and platforms for them with a lot of Open Source technologies. He now works as a DevOps Cloud Engineer at The Factory.

Testing with k6 + Grafana: Better together by Nicole van der Hoeven

k6 is one of the newest additions to the Grafana Labs family, but what exactly is it, and what does it have to do with Grafana? In this session, Nicole van der Hoeven will demonstrate how to use k6, how to integrate it with Grafana, and why k6 and Grafana are better together. Nicole van der Hoeven is a Developer Advocate at k6, living in the Netherlands.

Tales of A11y In Grafana OS: Introducing Pa11y CI into our pipeline by Alexa Vargas

We want to make Grafana accessible to everyone! In this talk, Alexa will share how Grafana recently introduced Pa11y CI into the Grafana Continuous Integration pipeline. The library supports our developers and contributors to highlight a11y issues. And more importantly, it acts as a gatekeeper, stopping new A11y issues from making it into the project. You will additionally hear about the alternatives that were considered and their challenges. This talk will have everything!

Using Thanos to gain a unified way to query over multiple clusters by Wiard van Rij

When using Thanos on top of Prometheus we can leverage this for a unified way in a single data source to query all our data across multiple clusters, servers and Prometheis. Wiard van Rij is an Engineer at Fullstaq helping people, teams, and organizations with various cloud-native challenges with a strong focus on Kubernetes and Observability. Wiard is a Thanos team member, open source enthusiast and has extra fun with security and hacking.

Filter dashboards faster with template variable available values

Datadog’s template variables help you quickly scope your dashboards to specific contexts using tags, so you can visualize data from only the hosts, containers, services, or any other tagged objects you care about. This helps you build more flexible dashboards so you can access the insights you’re looking for as quickly as possible. We’re proud to announce new features for the template variable workflow that enable you to make highly dynamic, shareable dashboards more efficiently.

Grafana 8.2 released: Dynamic plugin catalog, new fine-grained access control permissions, and more

Grafana 8.2 is here! This release marks the start of our work focused on measurable improvements to Grafana’s accessibility — part of our continuing mission to democratize metrics for everyone. The initial changes to Grafana in 8.2 are focused on navigation, with more to come. We’ll be sharing more about our accessibility roadmap in an upcoming blog post.

Dashboard Fridays

We are excited to announce a new community initiative – Dashboard Fridays. Dashboard Fridays is a bite-sized video series where we share and discuss a range of different dashboards created for the community, by the community. Each video is no longer than 20min, so grab a coffee and let’s talk dashboards! Each episode, we will zoom in on one stellar dashboard put together by a member of the community.

Is service catalog the modern CMDB?

SquaredUp recently launched a PowerShell tile that lets you visualize data returned from a PowerShell script. This has opened virtually infinite doors to the sources you can get data from. PowerShell can work with crazy text formats obscure databases, and endpoints that are open on the internet. If you can access it, PowerShell can work with it. And SquaredUp lets you leverage that power so you can get the information you need and visualize it in a format that makes sense.

Dashboard Fridays: Sample VMware Status Dashboard

Join SquaredUp's Adam Kinniburgh and fellow virtualisation expert Shawn Williams as they showcase the VMware Status Dashboard. Built in SquaredUp with the easy-to-use PowerShell tile, this dashboard surfaces data from vCenter for Hosts and VM to provide a Virtualization Administrator the information they need at a glance. Tune in to learn how it was made, the challenges it solves, and Shawn's top tips for building it yourself.