Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2022

Getting Started with Prometheus and Grafana

The world is moving towards a data-driven society, resulting in businesses gathering more data to leverage for profit. This data is either in structured forms like JSON/CSV/XML or unstructured forms like text written on a notepad or typed texts. Regardless of the data’s formatting, the important thing is the information it contains. Various tools in the market extract data from different agents and platforms that will improve your metric monitoring system.

Video: Top 3 features of the New Relic data source plugin for Grafana Enterprise

Grafana Labs and New Relic have a long history of working together to drive cross-functionality so joint customers can benefit from using Grafana and New Relic together. The New Relic data source plugin for Grafana — which is available to users with a Grafana Cloud account or with a Grafana Enterprise license — is no exception. In this quick tutorial video, we’ll not only show you how easy it is to configure the New Relic data source plugin in Grafana.

Dashboard Fridays: Sample Salesforce dashboard

In our latest Dashboard Fridays episode we showcase this sample Salesforce metrics dashboard built using SquaredUp. Pulling data from Salesforce, this dashboard provides visibility of new business performance for the entire company. Accessed individually or viewed on an office wallboard – all employees from Engineering, Marketing, Sales and Finance can stay up to date with latest sales performance data.

How relabeling in Prometheus works

Relabeling is a powerful tool that allows you to classify and filter Prometheus targets and metrics by rewriting their label set. The purpose of this post is to explain the value of Prometheus’ relabel_config block, the different places where it can be found, and its usefulness in taming Prometheus metrics. Much of the content here also applies to Grafana Agent users. For reference, here’s our guide to Reducing Prometheus metrics usage with relabeling.

Managed self-hosted Git service Gitea with the new integration for Grafana Cloud

Today I’m back with another integration available for Grafana Cloud, our observability platform that gathers all your metrics, logs, and traces under a single roof with Grafana. I’m going to highlight how you can use Grafana with Gitea, an open source forge software package for hosting software development version control. It uses Git as well as other collaborative features like bug tracking, wikis, and code review. It is a great choice for those who manage Git repositories.

Taking care of your loved ones with Grafana and other open source solutions

Amon Reich is the founder of SmartLiving.Rocks based out of Schweinfurt, Germany, an IoT solutions provider for smart homes and small businesses. Amon maintains the open source SeniorenSmarthome project, which enables Ambient Assisted Living through Grafana dashboards and other open source technologies. I’ve been working in the field of smart technology for over 10 years.

We think Grafana Labs has built something special - and two prestigious lists agree

We have always thought of our organization as special. Our plans were never to build a traditional business, and we know we have a unique culture. But it is nice when others outside of our company recognize that Grafana Labs is something special, too. This week, we were excited to be included on two very prestigious lists: The Enterprise Tech 30 and America’s Best Startup Employers.

Dashboard Fridays: Log Analytics VM Updates

Join Adam Kinniburgh in this latest Dashboard Fridays episode, in which he showcases this VM Updates dashboard, built with the WebAPI tile for the CE and SCOM editions. Since there is a native connection to the Log Analytics workspace in the Azure edition, here it is created using the native Logs tile. This dashboard surfaces key metric data for Virtual Machines, regardless of where the servers are hosted.

Introducing New Storage Dashboards in the Cloud Monitoring Console (CMC)

Monitoring and gaining additional insights about usage of your Splunk Cloud Platform deployment is essential for effective management as a Splunk admin. Your Splunk Cloud comes with the Cloud Monitoring Console (CMC) app, which displays relevant information about the status of your Splunk Cloud environment using pre-built dashboards.

Splunk UI and the Dashboard Framework: More Visual Control Than Ever

If you attended.conf21, or followed any Splunk blogs by Lizzy Li for the past year, then you likely have heard of Splunk Dashboard Studio — our new built-in dashboarding experience included in Splunk Enterprise 8.2 and higher and Splunk Cloud Platform 8.1.2103 and higher. With new, beautiful visualizations and the ability for more visual control over the dashboard, our customers and Splunkers alike have been creating beautiful and insightful dashboards to turn data into doing.

How to monitor your Apache Spark cluster with 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 journey. 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 Labs products.

On the Brittleness of Dashboards

Dashboards are one of the most basic and popular tools software engineers use to operate their systems. In this post, I'll make the argument that their use is unfortunately too widespread, and that the reflex we have to use and rely on them tends to drown out better, more adapted approaches, particularly in the context of incidents.

Virtualization Management: What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Streamline Your Dashboard

Let’s say that you’re a real estate investor with lots of buildings in your portfolio. But you choose not to employ a caretaker when you fully know that you aren’t always available to monitor every building. What do you think will become of some of them?

Monitor real-time distributed messaging platform NSQ with the new integration for Grafana Cloud

Today, I am excited to introduce the NSQ integration available for Grafana Cloud, our platform that brings together all your metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana for full-stack observability. NSQ is a real-time distributed messaging platform designed to operate at scale, handling billions of messages per day. It’s a simple and lightweight alternative to other message queues such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, or ActiveMQ. This will walk you through how to get the most out of the integration.

Optimizing Web Performance: Understanding Waterfall Charts

Waterfall charts are diagrams which represent how website resources are being downloaded, parsed by the engine, in a timeline that gives us the opportunity to see the sequence and dependencies between resources. It assists in identifying where important events happened during the loading process. They can also let the user easily see how good or bad the performance of their website is, showing you exactly what is slowing down your site.

Dashboard Fridays: Log Analytics VM Insights

Join Adam Kinniburgh in this latest Dashboard Fridays episode, in which he showcases a Log Analytics VM Insights dashboard. This dashboard, built with the WebAPI tile for the CE and SCOM editions of SquaredUp, surfaces key metric data for Virtual Machines, regardless of where the servers are hosted. In this short video, we'll demonstrate how this dashboard was built using SquaredUp dashboards, the challenges it solves, and how you can easily replicate it in your own environment.

How Dapper Labs uses Grafana Cloud to meet the global demand of NFT Mania

Ever since a JPEG created by the digital artist Beeple sold for more than $69 million in 2021, the worldwide obsession with NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that represent digital collectibles, art, and media has been growing. A company at the forefront of the NFT world is the blockchain gaming studio Dapper Labs, which leverages blockchain to build addictive games (such as CryptoKitties), verify authentic digital collectibles, and run fan tokens for sports personalities and music artists.

New in Grafana 8.4: How to use full-range log volume histograms with Grafana Loki

In the freshly released Grafana 8.4, we’ve enabled the full-range log volume histogram for the Grafana Loki data source by default. Previously, the histogram would only show the values over whatever time range the first 1,000 returned lines fell within. Now those using Explore to query Grafana Loki will see a histogram that reflects the distribution of log lines over their selected time range.

How summary metrics work in Prometheus

A summary is a metric type in Prometheus that can be used to monitor latencies (or other distributions like request sizes). For example, when you monitor a REST endpoint you can use a summary and configure it to provide the 95th percentile of the latency. If that percentile is 120ms that means that 95% of the calls were faster than 120ms, and 5% were slower. Summary metrics are implemented in the Prometheus client libraries, like client_golang or client_java.