Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

June 2022

Grafana reporting: How we improved the UX in Grafana

Behind every feature in Grafana, no matter how big or small, lies a lot of hard work, commitment, and attention to detail. At Grafana Labs, we use a cross-functional team approach to come up with ideas and solutions that ultimately make our products more usable, resilient, and adaptable to user needs. To achieve this, we work collaboratively across the UX, product, and engineering disciplines.

Have fun again creating, discover visual console and dashboard editing

The visual console editor allows the user to visually design the final layout by dragging elements with the mouse, choosing the background and the icons that represent the status of each relevant aspect you want to show. With dashboards you may define screens with different created visual elements and share them with other users or display them in full screen as slides for the whole team to see.

Dashboard Studio: Level-Up Your App with Dashboard Studio

Dashboards are a powerful tool for communicating a lot of information at once. Many Splunk apps are packaged with dashboards to help you make the most of your data. For example, the Microsoft 365 App for Splunk comes with a number of dashboards to provide insights around usage, incidents, and more.

New in Grafana 9: Role-based access control (RBAC) is now GA

Role-based access control (RBAC), previously referred to as fine-grained access control (FGAC), is Grafana’s new authorization system. It was introduced as a beta feature in Grafana 8.0 release a year ago, and we’re now excited to promote it to general availability status. With the release of Grafana 9.0 during GrafanaCONline 2022, RBAC is enabled by default for all instances. (The easiest way to get started with Grafana 9? Sign up for a free Grafana Cloud account today.)

How to send logs to Grafana Loki with the OpenTelemetry Collector using Fluent Forward and Filelog receivers

In this guide, we’ll set up an OpenTelemetry Collector that collects logs and sends them to Grafana Loki running in Grafana Cloud. We will consider two examples for sending logs to Loki via OpenTelemetry Collector. The first one shows how to collect container logs with a Fluent Forward receiver. The second one shows how to collect system logs with a Filelog receiver.

Anomaly rate in every chart

A month ago, we introduced unsupervised ML & Anomaly Detection in Netdata, the Anomaly Advisor. Today, we’re happy to announce that we’re bringing anomaly rates to every chart in Netdata Cloud. Anomaly information is no longer limited to the Anomalies tab and will be accessible to you from the Overview and Single Node View tabs as well. This will make your troubleshooting journey easier, as you will have the anomaly rates for any metric available with a single click.

New in Grafana 9: Introducing the command palette

Grafana is an open source tool for people with many different perspectives and various skill levels. Many initiatives to improve the Grafana user experience start by thinking about someone who’s just getting started on their observability journey. However, late last year, a Grafana Labs hackathon team looked to improve the user experience for our power users by introducing a command palette to Grafana.

Dashboard Studio: More Maps & More Interactivity

In Splunk Cloud Platform 8.2.2203, we're continuing to expand on interactivity capabilities and visualizations for Dashboard Studio. We've added the ability to use search results and job metadata as tokens, and pass tokens through drilldowns to other dashboards. There is a new map visualization for cluster maps and UI to match strings for dynamic coloring. And finally, we've included the ability to set a Studio dashboard as your home dashboard.

Introducing the new and improved Grafana BigQuery plugin

We are happy to announce that an official Google BigQuery data source plugin for Grafana has arrived! Based on the popular DoiT International BigQuery DataSource community plugin, the new Grafana BigQuery plugin brings a new and improved query editor experience plus support for all BigQuery data types, Grafana Alerting, and query caching.

GrafanaCONline 2022 Day 4 recap: Grafana Labs technical docs, citizen science with Grafana Cloud, load testing with Grafana k6, and more

GrafanaCONline 2022 wrapped up on Friday, and the big finish featured sessions that covered important changes in Grafana Labs technical documentation, Grafana Cloud’s role in activist engineering projects, and the benefits of load testing with k6. There was also a great success story out of East Africa, where a major bank switched to a business monitoring system with Grafana and improved its customer satisfaction and revenue.

Inside Grafana Labs hackathons: how they work and what projects ended up on the product roadmap

Three times a year, Grafanistas around the world step away from their daily responsibilities for one week and put their creative energy into what has quickly become a cultural touchstone at Grafana Labs: Our company-wide hackathon.

GrafanaCONline 2022 Day 3 recap: Alerting in Grafana 9, Loki developments, dashing dashboards, and more!

GrafanaCONline 2022 is still going strong, with sessions that covered alerting in Grafana 9, developments in Grafana Loki, and some winning Loki use cases. Plus, there was a talk about building an a F1 telemetry analysis solution that uses Grafana Cloud, along with plenty of dashboard discussions.

GrafanaCONline 2022 Day 2 recap: Grafana 9, Grafana Mimir, Grafana Tempo demos, new hackathon projects, and more

The excitement around GrafanaCONline 2022 continues to soar after another day filled with demos of new features and functionalities in Grafana 9, Grafana Mimir, and Grafana Tempo. Plus we learned how a mini arcade turned into a Grafana display; how Grafana transformed into a health tracker, and how, yes, Grafana can run Doom.

GrafanaCONline 2022 Day 1 recap: Grafana 9 release, Grafana OnCall open source, Grafana and Grafana Loki in space, and more!

GrafanaCONline 2022 is off to a great start with exciting news from around the Grafana-verse and a jam-packed day filled with dashboards showcasing how Grafana is used in space, in industrial IoT, at live events, and even in an effort to prevent food waste.

GrafanaCONline 2022: A guide to all the big announcements from Grafana Labs

We have lift off! GrafanaCONline 2022 officially launched today with the opening keynote featuring Grafana Labs CEO and Co-founder Raj Dutt, Chief Grafana Officer and Co-founder Torkel Ödegaard, and Senior Engineering Manager Myrle Krantz. Along with previewing the much-anticipated release of Grafana 9.0, we revealed some exciting news for our open source community. Below is a summary of all the major headlines that mark one small step for Grafana, one giant leap for the Grafana community.

Grafana 9.0: Prometheus and Grafana Loki visual query builders, new navigation, improved workflows, heatmap panels, and more!

GrafanaCONline, our annual community event designed for Grafana open source users and dashboarding enthusiasts, also marks the general availability of Grafana’s latest and greatest release. Grafana 9.0 is now available to both open source and Grafana Enterprise users, and is being rolled out to Grafana Cloud users incrementally. (The majority of instances have already been upgraded!) New Grafana Cloud users will immediately get the Grafana 9.0 experience.

How to build a dashboard for any AWS CloudWatch data

Looking to keep an eye on logs and metrics from AWS or CloudWatch? There are several reasons you might want to build a CloudWatch dashboard somewhere outside of the CloudWatch console: Whatever the reason, we’ve put together a write-up to help you plug into CloudWatch to surface any logs or metrics in one place, for easy alerting and sharing, using the SquaredUp observability portal. You can get your own SquaredUp account, just head over to squaredup.io/get-started to sign-up for a free account.

A quick guide to load testing Grafana Loki with Grafana k6

As a software engineer here at Grafana Labs, I’ve learned there are two questions that commonly come up when someone begins setting up a new Loki installation: “How many logs can I ingest into my cluster?” followed by, “How fast can I query these logs?” There are two ways to find out the answers.

Expanding Vision: OpenSearch Dashboards Advance Open Source Observability

From the moment Elastic announced plans to abandon a pure open source license for its Elasticsearch engine and Kibana dashboards in early 2021, there’s been a massive effort underway to create clear alternatives for the global community of active users. Logz.io has been an outspoken advocate and contributor to this work – fully embracing it as part of our product roadmap to best serve the needs of our customers, and preserve our long-term commitment to open source observability.

Grafana dashboards: A complete guide to all the different types you can build

There is one universal truth about using Grafana: Dashboards are easy to create, but not-so-easy to organize. As organizations scale, there’s a high risk of unchecked dashboard sprawl, when dashboards become an unmanageable mess. As the number of users increase, so does their dashboard output. Our guide to dashboard management gives an overview of features that help with organizing dashboards, but there are still two pain points.

What's next in Kubernetes monitoring, Prometheus histograms, observability, and more: KubeCon EU 2022 in review

In May, a team from Grafana Labs descended on Valencia, Spain, to share their latest insights on the cloud native landscape at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2022. Along with diving into the future of Kubernetes monitoring with kubectl alpha events and multi-cloud deployments, Grafanistas presented an overview of the Prometheus ecosystem with an eye towards how sparse high-resolution histograms are going to change the game.

Observability strategies that work - and some that don't

Creating an observability strategy is a lot like playing with Legos: It takes small building blocks to create a bigger picture, but the slightest mistake could throw off an entire build — and often you realize it very late in the process and have to rip and repair the Hogwarts castle infrastructure you spent many days creating.