Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2022

Fixing SCOM's blind spots

Since its origins as MOM 2000, SCOM has been widely regarded for being awesome at two things: firstly, being the hands-down best solution for monitoring Windows Server environments (it is Microsoft’s monitoring tool, after all); and secondly, being an extensible monitoring platform that can act as a single pane of glass across your data center environment.

How Theia Scientific and Volkov Labs use Grafana and AI to analyze scientific images

Dr. Christopher Field is Co-Founder, President, and Principal Investigator at Theia Scientific. With formal education in analytical chemistry and instrumentation, Chris has expertise in scientific hardware and software design, deploying embedded Linux devices for Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor fusion applications, and developing computer vision and image processing pipelines for cell analysis.

Introducing the new Confluent Cloud integration for Grafana Cloud

At Grafana Labs, we’re continuing to expand our platform of Grafana Cloud integrations that make it easier than ever to connect and monitor external systems. These integrations enable you to answer the big picture questions in your organization and tell your observability story.

Set up and observe a Spring Boot application with Grafana Cloud, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry

Spring Boot is a very popular microservice framework that significantly simplifies web application development by providing Java developers with a platform to get started with an auto-configurable, production-grade Spring application. In this blog, we will walk through detailed steps on how you can observe a Spring Boot application, by instrumenting it with Prometheus and OpenTelementry and by collecting and correlating logs, metrics, and traces from the application in Grafana Cloud.

New in the Kubernetes integration for Grafana Cloud: Kubernetes events, Pod logs, and more

The Kubernetes integration for Grafana Cloud helps users easily monitor and alert on core Kubernetes metrics using the Grafana Agent, our lightweight observability data collector optimized for sending metric, log, and trace data to Grafana Cloud. It packages together a set of easy-to-deploy manifests for the Agent, along with prebuilt dashboards and alerts.

eCommerce giant Blinkit's journey from ELK Stack to Grafana Cloud

The promise: Order any groceries and essentials from Blinkit’s mobile app, and they’ll be delivered to your doorstep within 10 minutes. The process: Very difficult with a legacy logging tool. For Blinkit, the instant delivery service formerly known as Grofers that serves millions of consumers across India, their tech stack was beginning to interfere with business operations at a time when the company was hyperscaling due to its popularity.

Dashboard Fridays: Sample M365 dashboard

In this latest Dashboard Fridays episode, join our VP of Innovation Adam Kinniburgh as he showcases this M365/O365 dashboard built with SquaredUp. This summary dashboard built for the MP using SCOM Edition gives a clear overview of your M365/0365 health, including: subscriptions, consumed licences, network issues, teams performance, mail flow duration and more. This dashboard pack also includes a bunch of cool perspectives with dedicated views (open and closed alerts, metrics, health) for different components, including licencing, teams, alerts and more.

New in Grafana 8.5: updated panels, new RBAC features, simplified reporting, and more!

Grafana 8.5 is here! Download Grafana 8.5 We’ve worked on a variety of improvements that focus on Grafana’s usability, data visualization, and security. For a full list of new features and capabilities, check out our What’s New in Grafana 8.5 documentation. You can get started with Grafana in minutes with Grafana Cloud. We have free and paid Grafana Cloud plans to suit every use case — sign up for free now.

Analyzing Cardinality in Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise Metrics

Cardinality Analysis of metrics is an enabler to reducing costs and focusing observability on the necessary metrics to identify and investigate where issues are occurring in your services. Grafana has added cardinality management dashboards to Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise Metrics to make this an easy and fast process. In this introductory session, we will provide an overview of the Grafana Cardinality features and offer a set of discovery questions to help you with the process.

How AgriTech used IoT and Grafana to help industrial hemp farmers hit a new production high

In 2019, Alexander Mann was working in the microchip industry, putting in 12-hour shifts that left no time for him to tend to his large vegetable garden. “I started looking for ways that I could remotely water or check on my plants,” he says. Products that could help him were either too costly for a hobby gardener or required special internet connections, so Mann decided to learn about IoT and create his own setup.

Monitoring critical systems at Roblox with Grafana and Grafana Agent

It’s like an obby unto itself: With roughly 100 million global active users, how does an observability team monitor operations and troubleshoot problems that pop up across more than 10,000 servers? In this session, you’ll get an inside look at how the Roblox team evolved their observability platform to combine a multitude of data sources, from low-level hardware health to high-level performance metrics. Grafana Agent plays a key role by replacing many special-purpose pipelines with a single, easy-to-manage tool. Roblox’s observability team has met growing demand to provide actionable insights to hundreds of engineers, covering dozens of data sources and thousands of Grafana dashboards, which all help keep its infrastructure running and ready for play.

Tackling Your Carbon Footprint with the Sustainability Toolkit for Splunk

Simple questions can be overwhelming and not knowing the answer after a mouse click is no longer an option: Sustainability is top of mind for organizations across all verticals and Splunk can help with the power of data. Our upcoming Sustainability Toolkit based on the Splunk platform equips organizations with capabilities to gain deep insights into their carbon footprint and as such empowers them to take the necessary actions towards their carbon neutrality goals.

New in Grafana Enterprise Metrics 2.0: Cross-tenant alerting and recording rules

On the heels of launching our new open source TSDB Grafana Mimir, we are excited to introduce Grafana Enterprise Metrics 2.0. GEM 2.0 is built on top of Grafana Mimir 2.0, our easy-to-operate, high-scale database which we’ve shown can handle upwards of 1 billion active series. That means that GEM 2.0 inherits all of the highlights of Mimir, including easy deployment, native multi-tenancy, high availability, durable long-term metrics storage, and exceptional query performance.

Grafana Labs EMEA Virtual Meetup - April 2022

Join Grafanistas Jessica Brown, Marcus Olsson, and Mat Ryer as they present at the April 2022 Grafana Labs Virtual EMEA Meetup. Here's a brief look at their talks: “Extend your Grafana experience through plugins” By default, Grafana comes with an impressive set of different visualizations and data source integrations. But that’s not all! Many more panels and data sources are available as plugins, built by the Grafana community. In this session, you’ll learn about the new in-app plugin catalog and a few nifty plugins to get you started using plugins!

Dashboard Fridays: Sample SQLFacts dashboard

The ugly truth when working with SQL Server is that there usually isn’t much money left over for monitoring once you pay for the license. Most DBAs accept this reality by implementing a custom data collection. But what happens when all you want is to visualize that data quickly? Tune into our latest Dashboard Fridays video to see this SQLFacts dashboard built to visualize the powerful suite of free tools.

How to upgrade to SCOM 2022 step-by-step

The long awaited SCOM 2022 is here! If you’d like to know what improvements to expect, check out our blog on SCOM 2022 key highlights. If you’re as excited as we are and would like to proceed with your upgrade, keep reading, this is the detailed step-by-step guide you are looking for. We will take you through the whole process, covering: Stick with us, and by the end of this blog you’ll have successfully upgraded to SCOM 2022!

100% office-based to remote-first: SquaredUp's journey

Back when everyone was talking about the ‘new normal’ and what the future of work would look like post-pandemic, SquaredUp was having a rethink too. SquaredUp has always been a 100%, office-based company with a heart for bringing people together. Richard Benwell, CEO, and the executive team had created a company that is truly fun, collaborative, and integrated, largely based on their drive to keep people connected and build an incredible community – in the office.

Grafana Labs announces $240 million Series D round led by GIC and welcomes new investor J.P. Morgan

Today, I’m happy to share that Grafana Labs has closed a $240 million Series D round of investment. This is a major milestone for us that goes well beyond the number of dollars. First, we are grateful to our internal team (affectionately called Grafanistas) and our community of users and customers. Without them, we would not have been given this opportunity.

How to use WebSockets to visualize real-time IoT data in Grafana

Mike Szczys is a Developer Relations Engineer at Golioth. His deep love of microcontrollers began in the early 2000s, growing from the desire to make more of the BEAM robotics he was building. When he’s not reading data sheets, he’s busy as an orchestra musician in Madison, Wisconsin. At Golioth, a commercial IoT development platform, we love using the power of Grafana to easily visualize data from IoT installations where tens, hundreds, or even thousands of devices are reporting back.