Numbers don’t lie — and the data shows that in a year in which we, once again, endured unpredictable changes, Grafana experienced unparalleled success. In June, we introduced Grafana 8.0, which included unified alerting, new visualizations, real-time streaming, and more. Since then we have introduced a host of new features as well as new data source plugins that only reinforce Grafana’s commitment to our “big tent” philosophy.

Here’s a look back at the releases, products, community stories, and major announcements that defined another incredible year for Grafana Labs.

Ever known a project manager who thinks a task takes minutes when it really takes hours? One company has developed a helpful monitoring tool that not only helps project managers make more realistic estimates, but also helps product teams save time, increase efficiency, and improve their overall performance. At ObservabilityCON 2020, Walter Ritzel Paixão Côrtes, a product designer at Dell, gave a presentation about a data-driven solution his team developed called Product Team Observability.

On Dec. 8, we gathered the Grafana EMEA community for another dynamic meetup. Experts from the Grafana Labs and k6 teams alongside observability pros from different organizations covered topics ranging from shift left observability practices to monitoring your green thumb at home with Grafana. In case you missed the virtual get together, here’s a recap of each talk along with the session videos.

If you have been trying to compare all of the best data visualisation tools you may have found it difficult to find a detailed list that includes both open-source and proprietary solutions to help you compare and make an informed decision on what you need going forward. In this guide, you will find out everything you need to know about the leading solutions for data visualisation to help you get started with your next analysis project.

At re:Invent this year, AWS announced its new digital twin service, AWS IoT TwinMaker (in preview), which allows users to create digital twins of real-world systems like buildings, factories, industrial equipment, and production lines. Using a digital twin to monitor and improve operations for a physical system requires ingesting data from IoT sensors, process instruments, cameras, and enterprise systems, and curating and associating data from these disparate sources.

In collaboration with the AWS team, we have recently released the new Redshift data source plugin for Grafana. Amazon Redshift is the fastest and most widely used cloud data warehouse. It uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes by using AWS-designed hardware and machine learning.

If you are looking for your next role which involves an in-depth knowledge of Grafana then you will want to make sure that you have revised sufficiently beforehand. In this resource guide on the top Grafana interview questions, we've listed all of the leading questions that candidates are commonly asked about this popular visual analysis tool alongside the answers you’ll need to pass. Want to improve your knowledge even further?

Monitoring is usually associated with servers and applications, but the fintech automation platform Ocrolus recently needed to set up monitoring for a different purpose: to gain meaningful data and insights about nearly 1,000 remote user workstations.

In this post, we are going to cover some of the most common misconceptions and queries users have about AWS Elasticsearch, Open Distro & OpenSearch as these three terms are often being used interchangeably to refer to any Amazon backed distribution of Elasticsearch and Kibana.

We’re thrilled to announce the addition of the Sentry data source plugin to Grafana. Grafana Labs worked in partnership with Sentry, the code observability platform, to help development teams see the issues that matter and solve them faster — across their entire tech stack — so they can remove silos and ship with confidence.

Amazon CloudWatch has recently launched Metrics Insights (Preview) — a fast, flexible, SQL-based query engine that enables you to identify trends and patterns across millions of operational metrics in real-time. With Metrics Insights, you can easily query and analyze your metrics to gain better visibility into the health and performance of your infrastructure and large scale applications.

During Logz.io’s ScaleUp 2021 user conference, we announced that Unified Dashboards were coming to you soon. And now it’s finally here for anyone to try during the Public Beta. Unified Dashboards will allow Logz.io customers to analyze and filter their logs, metrics, and traces side-by-side on a single monitoring dashboard. Check out our recent blog to learn about why we built Unified Dashboards and the value they bring to customers.

In collaboration with the AWS team, we have recently released the new Athena data source plugin for Grafana. Athena is an interactive serverless service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena supports a wide variety of data formats including CSV, JSON, ORC, Arvo, and Parquet. Athena also integrates with AWS Glue Data Catalog, which allows you to create tables and query data based on a central metadata store of many AWS services, such as CloudFront, ELB, and more.

Interpreting data and making fast decisions is critical for any leader in today's business world. But how is it done? Everyone remembers the old way of doing things where analysts would manually crunch the numbers and give a final output. This business intelligence would be presented to their boss, and decisions would be made. This batch way of running numbers and presenting them is not sustainable due to the massive amount of manual effort involved to recompile datasets and present them properly.

According to a 2020 CNCF survey, the use of containers in production has been rapidly increasing for the past several years. Nutanix, a global leader in cloud software and a pioneer in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, is part of that trend.

Development is no longer a linear journey from point A to point B. As more projects shift into a state of organic growth, user feedback and constant experimentation are increasingly becoming the norm, if not the standard for engineering. “In order to support this rapid experimentation, we’re beginning to embrace new working methods and practices,” said Vinodh Ravi, Executive Director of Platform Engineering at JPMorgan Chase.

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. The integration allows Grafana Cloud users to monitor and alert on Kubernetes cluster metrics. Since the original release, we’ve added new features and enhancements to help our users go even further.

Grafana 8.3 is here! This is an exciting release for Grafana Labs. This release includes the new Candlestick panel, a new visualization suggestions engine, support for AWS Metrics Insights and, for our Grafana Enterprise users, recorded queries. Get 8.3 You can get started with Grafana in minutes with Grafana Cloud. Here’s a closer look at the important new features in 8.3.

We heard that you love telling complex data stories by building beautiful dashboards on Splunk Dashboard Studio. Now get these dashboards into the hands of even more users anywhere at any time with Dashboard Studio on Splunk Mobile and Splunk TV.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a well-done data visualization is worth a million. The quality of a dashboard can make or break an application. In this tutorial, you will learn how to make high-quality data visualizations easily by using the Nivo charting library with ReactJS. You will also learn how to query data stored in InfluxDB to make your charts dynamic and versatile.