Have you ever struggled to have efficient visibility into your APM and log data? Have you ever been called on to display real-time data to your Sales or Marketing department, only to find yourself fumbling over the numbers without a way to display relevant data? Look no further! Retrace collects huge amounts of data about your application’s health and performance, then provides a customizable display in one place – your customizable APM Dashboards.
The Grafana Agent team is excited to announce Grafana Agent Flow, our newest experimental feature in today’s Grafana Agent v0.28.0 release. Flow is an easier and more powerful way to configure, run, and debug the Grafana Agent! 🎉
SquaredUp Cloud has been in development for over two years (we first previewed it at SquaredUp Live, Spring 2021). It continues our mission to unlock and summarize data – think of it like “BI for engineering”. In building SquaredUp Cloud, we drew upon what we’ve learned with our Microsoft solutions over the last ten years, and built a solution independent of any one tool, like SCOM.
At Grafana Labs we run a lot of distributed databases. These distributed databases all make use of a hash ring in order to evenly distribute workloads across replicas of certain components. For a more detailed description of the architecture of our projects, check out our Mimir architecture docs.
Although there are many great tools out there to get on top of application monitoring, there’s one vital metric that’s often overlooked by us technical folks – cost. In the days of running apps on servers in private datacenters, the kit was a one-time purchase that the systems team had to deal with. But running apps in public clouds is a different story. Whether you’re running on VMs, containers in Kubernetes, or entirely serverless, execution of your code adds to the bill.
Armin Müller is the co-founder of ScopeSET. ScopeSET specializes in R&D work to build and integrate tools in the model-based systems engineering domain, with a track record of more than 15 years of delivering innovative solutions for ESA and the aerospace industry. Training machine learning models takes a lot of time, so we’re always looking for ways to accelerate the process at ScopeSET. We use open source components to build research and development tools for technical companies.
It's not like it used to be back in the day! Before CI/CD, we were building on-premises, service-oriented products following system style architecture and we were able to map out the build system and end-to-end process in a PowerPoint or Visio document. Although time-consuming and inefficient, it was relatively straightforward and the build pipeline was unlikely to change drastically. But that's no longer the case.
It's always interesting to hear what feature requests dashboard users share with our product team. Sometimes it's big things — such as being able to set tokens on drilldowns — and sometimes it's little things. In Splunk Cloud Platform 9.0.2208, we've included a handful of Dashboard Studio "little things" updates.
Project managing global software projects is always a challenge, contending with multiple time zones, tools, and teams. In these environments, the day-to-day life of a Project Manager is filled with status collections, project reporting, and little time for much else. While the detail will always matter – like team bug data, feature status, and build progress – there is a better way than collecting and reporting on all this data manually. Does this scenario sound familiar?
It may seem like ancient history, but there was a time when telecommunications companies only had to worry about connecting customers over landlines. Today, their businesses depend on vast cellular networks to not only provide strong wireless phone coverage in countless locations, but also handle the demands of tablets, computers, and machine-to-machine communications.
When COVID-19 hit, Yonatan Mevorach faced an unexpected challenge, which required an unexpected solution. The Infrastructure Team Lead at Wix, the popular website building platform, was accustomed to looking at multiple monitors on the walls of the software company’s offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. These monitors cycled through Grafana dashboards to help the team keep tabs on Wix’s many services.
Alerting infrastructure is often complex, with many pieces of the pipeline that often live in different places. Scaling this across many teams and organizations is an especially challenging task. As organizations grow in size, the observability component tends to grow along with it. For example, you may have many components, each of which needs a different set of alerts. You may have several teams, each with a different channel where notifications should be delivered.
Heroku is a cloud provider well known for its simplicity and its support out of the box for multiple programming languages. When thinking about consuming logs from applications hosted in Heroku, Grafana Loki is a great choice. But in the past, shipping logs from Heroku to any Loki instance required ad-hoc scripts to fiddle with Heroku’s logs format and send them. This can be a time-consuming experience.
Metrics are the cornerstone of an observable system – they tell you a system’s measured outputs, granting visibility into what your customers are experiencing and when there’s a problem. However, not all methods for recording and saving metrics from a system’s output are alike. The best method for shipping your system’s metrics to Grafana Cloud depends on many factors, varying from the source of your metrics data to your familiarity with observability tools.
Here at Grafana Labs, we’re always striving to reduce the amount of effort needed to maintain plugins across different versions of Grafana. That is why we’re excited to provide you with a tool to check the compatibility of your plugin with the latest Grafana plugins API. We know that it can be frustrating for developers to find out people can’t use their plugins. Over the past few months, we’ve been working on detecting the breaking changes as soon as they happen.
We are thrilled to announce that Grafana Incident is now generally available to all Grafana Cloud users, including our generous free tier. (You can sign up for a free Grafana Cloud account now.)
How many Marvel movies’ worth of Internet traffic do 28,000 conference goers create during a five-day Cisco Live event? There’s a Grafana dashboard for that. Cisco Live is the network industry’s largest annual event, delivering education and inspiration to technology innovators worldwide with a week’s worth of programming keynotes, product announcements, entertainment, and more.
You may be asking yourself: What exactly is Podman? Podman is short for Pod Manager and is a daemonless, open source container engine alternative to Docker that allows for rootless containers. Podman is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems. It only requires a simple and easy install on RPM-based Linuxes, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Rocky, or AlmaLinux.
Back in my day, our offices used to have an “open concept” layout – just rows of desks. And at the end of every row was a 720i LCD TV showing 4 to 5 key metrics we’d watch after every release with great concern. While those wallboards sure were beautiful, we rarely had a clear view on how a release was trending. With our latest update to Dashboards, we’re joining form and function with Release Health widgets and a new release filter.
Traditionally the Prometheus TSDB only accepts in-order samples that are less than one hour old, discarding everything else. Having this requirement has allowed Prometheus to be extremely efficient with how it stores samples. And in practice, it really hasn’t really been much of a limitation for users because of the pull-based model in Prometheus, which scrapes data at a regular cadence off of the targets being observed. Several use cases, however, need out-of-order support.
Applications are built and run by many people and made of many components: infrastructure, code pipelines and end users to name a few. Understanding the status of those components and teams is never straight forward. In this blog, we will be unpacking the problem faced by most organizations and taking a look at how SquaredUp can empower you and your organization with status visibility across different teams / components / services – all in one view.
Every day, dashboards are viewed more than 500,000 times at Splunk. They’re what make the sea of data intelligible and help tell a story when working with a team. However, constant net-new dashboard creation is not necessarily a value-add activity — it’s a workflow to rapidly turn data into doing.
Houzz is where millions of homeowners and home improvement professionals go to seek inspiration and supplies for their remodeling projects. But to continue as the leading platform for home remodeling and design, the Houzz tech stack needed a renovation of its own as the company scaled. In response, the Houzz team began by revamping their monoliths into microservices.
More than 20,000 companies around the world use Ansible as their Infrastructure as Code and configuration management tool. With the rising popularity towards managing infrastructure using IaC and config management tools, Ansible is one of the best open source tools to choose from. That is why we are excited to announce a new Grafana Ansible collection available to all Grafana Cloud users, including those in the generous free tier.
It’s monitoring time. We all collect metrics from our system and applications to monitor their health, availability and performance. Our metrics are essentially time-series data collected from various endpoints. Then, it is stored in time series specialized databases, and then visualized in the metrics graphs we all know and love.
