Performance testing is an essential component of building fast and reliable web services. Until recently, this testing typically happened later in the development process and was often performed by a separate team or even a third party. But speed is the competitive advantage for companies, and prioritizing testing during the development process can speed time to market for new applications.
There can be as many as 64 important business metrics for your company to track (according to nTask). That can sound daunting. But if your organization doesn’t have the capacity to track all of them, it should at least track the most important ones according to its business model, stage and focus areas. For example, key product metrics not only provide information to product managers, but also other relevant stakeholders across the organization.
When you’re a sports betting technology company and you realize your in-house, on-prem Graphite solution for monitoring metrics is no longer a sure-thing, what do you do? That was the dilemma at Kambi, a quickly growing business – with a passion for using open source technology – that has about 500 different micro services in production and around 200,000 incoming metrics messages per second.
As the number of connected gadgets in our homes, offices, and industrial networks continues to grow exponentially, keeping IoT devices secure has become a vital part of our everyday lives. However, our webcams, printers, and smart plugs often lack security features due to their fast time to market, making them particularly vulnerable to attack. And because security metrics themselves can be tricky to assess, tracking IoT device security is increasingly a challenge.
It’s one thing to set up an observability strategy. But what’s it like to introduce and scale observability effectively across an organization? In a wide-ranging conversation at ObservabilityCON 2021, three technical pros from Snyk, TripAdvisor, and Citibank joined Grafana Labs VP Global Solutions Engineering Steve Mayzak and — with more than 75 years experience between them — they shared the triumphs and turbulence in their respective observability journeys.
Back in May, we announced the Kubernetes integration to help users 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. Since then, we’ve made some improvements to help our customers go even further.
On 2021-10-29, initial support for Prometheus Agent was merged, and it is slated for inclusion in Prometheus v2.32! This feature has a bit of a lengthy history to it: It took a little while to get to where we are today, but I’m thrilled that we were able to use the Grafana Agent code to enable agent-like functionality in the prometheus/prometheus repository.
In today’s cloud environments, a typical observability stack might include an Elasticsearch cluster for logging, a few Prometheus servers for metrics monitoring, and an AppDynamics deployment for APM. You may run something similar – most observability stacks consist of multiple siloed tools dedicated to collecting and analyzing specific types of monitoring data.
Business leaders talk excitedly about "digital transformation" and "innovative customer experience," but it falls on the shoulders of IT operations to make sure everything actually works. As transformation takes hold, IT teams manage increasingly complex, hybrid, and distributed environments – often comprising traditional on-premises systems and modern infrastructures made up of containers, multiple clouds, and virtualized networks.
Grafana is as open source analytics and interactive visualization application. You can connect different data sources to display chart and graphs or even trigger alerts. Wouldn’t it be great to add information about SIGNL4 alerts or about who is on call as part of your dashboard? In this case you immediately get an overview about open, acknowledged, and closed alerts per category. Of you can see wo it currently on duty. Here is an example with a who-is-on call, and an alert overview panel.
This morning during the ObservabilityCON keynote, we announced some of the exciting projects and feature enhancements we’ve been working on for our customers and community. And it doesn’t end there. Throughout the week, we’ll continue to unveil new features, go deeper with live demos, and share our plans to shape the future of observability. With so many new announcements and features to check out, we want to make sure you know where to get more details about these developments.
As a composable solution, Grafana allows you to bring your data into dashboards natively without having to extract it, load it, or transform it. We believe in a “big tent” philosophy, which allows you to choose the tools that best suit your observability strategy, and with our plugins, Grafana is interoperable with more than 100 data sources.
In this digital era, technology systems are becoming increasingly complex. No longer can a single SME (subject matter expert) understand every facet of the system they run. Instead, much of this knowledge is siloed and exists as tribal knowledge within certain teams. Additionally, the rate of change is faster than ever, with code deploying and new services shipping at a rate unimaginable a few years ago.
Grafana Labs recently hosted its first company-wide hackathon, and we joined forces with Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein to bring sparse high-resolution histograms in Prometheus TSDB into a working prototype. The Prometheus TSDB has gained experimental support to store and retrieve these new sparse high-resolution histograms. At PromCon 2021, we presented our exciting, fresh-off-the-presses results from the ongoing project.
HashiCorp Vault is an increasingly popular multi-cloud security tool that allows users to authenticate and access different clouds, systems, and endpoints, and centrally store, access, and deploy secrets. At Grafana Labs, we’re always looking for ways to make it easy for our community to get started monitoring important parts of their systems. So we’re happy to share some new integrations that will help our users get the most out of Grafana + Vault.
I am very excited that this year’s.conf21was the first.conf where we got to showcase Dashboard Studio, which has come built-in with every Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud Platform release, since 8.2 and 8.1.2103, respectively. I am even more excited to share a packed list of new features in the 8.2.2109 release, which coincides with.conf21! This blog post will highlight a few capability areas we've been heavily focused on that will help you do even more with your dashboards.
