Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2022

Installing the Hosted Graphite Heroku Monitoring & Dashboards Add-on.

HostedGraphite provides a complete infrastructure and application monitoring platform from a suite of open-source monitoring tools. Use Hosted Graphite and view all required metrics on beautiful dashboards in real time. Hosted Graphite offers a wide range of tools, add-ons, and plugins which make it possible to measure, analyze, and visualize large amounts of data about your applications with ease.

What can Elastic Synthetics tell us about Kibana Dashboards?

I like to leverage our technologies to ensure our products have a pleasant user experience. Elastic Synthetics enables you to configure it in an out-of-the-box experience directly through your Elastic Cloud deployment without the need to install anything! It also works across the globe with multiple locations you can choose from. Ever wondered how fast your web service is when accessed from Japan, Germany, or the eastern U.S.? Now you can do this by simply clicking on a checkbox.

Showcase dashboards securely and effortlessly with Skykit's offering in the Datadog Marketplace

For many organizations, making the most of the visibility Datadog offers into the health and performance of their infrastructure means displaying dashboards to stakeholders in various settings continuously and in real time. But the standard solutions for sharing dashboards to large-format displays can be onerous, involving sundry software and hardware and restrictive manual setups. These solutions can also pose significant security risks, since they tend to involve sharing passwords or devices.

Reduce MTTR and improve UX with Grafana Enterprise: Inside Optum's observability stack

Among the 12 greatest stressors in life, six revolve around healthcare issues. From loss of a loved one to pregnancy and even retirement, these events often involve interactions with healthcare services — interactions that can either add to an individual’s stress or, ideally, help alleviate it.

How to monitor the health and resource usage of Kubernetes nodes in Grafana Cloud

The spine is essential to perform every activity, like crawling, walking, or swimming. Just as the spine is necessary to enable these functions, your Kubernetes infrastructure needs a backbone to be efficient and effective. So if Kubernetes clusters act as the spine of your architecture, then Kubernetes nodes are like the vertebrae — they make up a Kubernetes cluster in the same way the vertebrae form the spinal column.

Dashboards vs. Reports: How to Get the Most out of Your ITSM Reporting Tools

At this point, we all know that reporting is an essential part of ITSM. It helps us to have clear information about the performance of the service desk and the support team and thus make better decisions. ITSM reporting tools consist of dashboards and reports, and though it might seem great to have only two, this often poses a question: when should I use each one? If you find yourself having a hard time deciding, this article is perfect for you! We’re about to oppose dashboards vs.

Managing and improving reliability using Gremlin's Reliability Dashboard

Part of a successful reliability program is being able to monitor and review your progress toward improving reliability. Being able to run tests on services is a big part of it, but how can you tell you're making progress if you can only see your latest test results? There should be a way to track improvements or regressions in your reliability testing practice across your organization in a way that's easy to digest. That's where the Reliability Dashboard comes in.

Grafana and Cilium: Deep eBPF-powered observability for Kubernetes and cloud native infrastructure

Today, Grafana Labs announced a strategic partnership with Isovalent, the creators of Cilium, to make it easy for platform and application teams to gain deep insights into the connectivity, security, and performance of the applications running on Kubernetes by leveraging the Grafana open source observability stack.

How We Built It: Getting Spooky with Splunk Dashboards

Dashboards are not just tools for businesses and other organizations to monitor and respond to their data, but can be a method of storytelling. All of our data has the potential to be crafted into compelling narratives, which can easily be accomplished with the help of Dashboard Studio’s customizable formats and advanced visualization tools. We can take a series of disparate datasets and bring them together in one place if they share a common theme — in this case, Halloween.

How to autoscale Grafana Loki queries using KEDA

Grafana Loki is Grafana Labs’ open source log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. Loki is horizontally scalable, highly available, and multi-tenant. In addition, Grafana Cloud Logs is our fully managed, lightweight, and cost-effective log aggregation system based on Grafana Loki, with free and paid options for individuals, teams, and large enterprises.

How to manage high cardinality metrics in Prometheus and Kubernetes

Over the last few months, a common and recurring theme in our conversations with users has been about managing observability costs, which is increasing at a rate faster than the footprint of the applications and infrastructure being monitored. As enterprises lean into cloud native architectures and the popularity of Prometheus continues to grow, it is not surprising that metrics cardinality (a cartesian combination of metrics and labels) also grows.

Get better insights from industrial IoT data with Grafana

Varland Plating has been in the electroplating business since 1946. At their industrial job shop in Cincinnati, Ohio, they perform complex electrochemical treatments on steel, brass, and copper manufactured parts to create everything from corrosion-resistant building materials to decorative metals.

Grafana 9.2 release: Troubleshooting Grafana panels with a new support feature

Ever run into issues building a panel in your Grafana dashboards? To help with those issues, the current support process for Grafana, Grafana Cloud, and Grafana Enterprise often requires many cycles where we request more information. This can be slow, frustrating for both our users and our support teams, and the process makes it difficult to reproduce issues without access to similar data.

Monitoring HPC system health with Grafana and Psychart

Nicolas Ventura is a critical facilities engineer at NERSC, with experience in both mechanical and computer systems. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a modern data center that’s home to two powerful high-performance computing (HPC) systems used for worldwide scientific research in genetics, physics, geology, and more. As such, the infrastructure team at NERSC has to closely track the facility conditions to ensure optimal operations.

5 key benefits of Kubernetes monitoring

Kubernetes made it much easier to deploy and scale containerized applications, but it also introduced new challenges for IT teams trying to keep tabs on these newly distributed systems. Ops teams need proper visibility into their Kubernetes clusters so they can track performance metrics, audit changes to deployed environments, and retrieve logs that help debug application crashes.

How to Simplify Your Graphite Metric Ingestion Pipeline with Histograms

Many organizations relying on Graphite will be leveraging telemetry provided through Statsd. And if you rely on Graphite in combination with StatsD telemetry, you’re likely suffering from aggregation bloat. In a typical Graphite ingestion pipeline, applications emit data points via UDP, which are then received by an aggregator such as StatsD. Most StatsD servers only offer static aggregations, which must be configured upfront.

Grafana 9.2 release: New Grafana panel help options, Grafana oauth updates, simplified variable editor for Grafana Loki, and more!

Welcome to Grafana 9.2, a jam-packed minor release with a wide range of improvements to help you create and share Grafana dashboards and alerts. Along with new developments for public dashboards and support for Google Analytics 4 properties, Grafana 9.2 offers new ways to connect with support teams about panel issues, a simplified query variable editor for Grafana Loki, improvements to access control, and much more.

Interval Selector in Sentry Dashboards

Demo of the new time interval selector feature within the Sentry Dashboards tab. These are actual videos submitted by Sentaurs for our monthly Show-N-Tell. We have not edited them except for obscuring personal information that may appear in screenshots. Some videos may include screenshots that contain fictitious usernames or email addresses for illustrative purposes.

Grafana k6 one year later: Lessons learned after an acquisition

A few years ago, I was meeting with venture capitalists and private equity firms about the future of k6, the open source performance testing tool that we created in 2016 and open sourced in 2017. After talking about the k6 product mission — to give modern engineering teams better tools to build reliable applications — one investor challenged us to create an even bigger vision for the company: What if we acquired a company to broaden the k6 story?

Announcing Grafana Cloud Link, a gateway from any local Grafana instance to Grafana Cloud

If you’ve had a local Grafana instance for any length of time, it’s likely dialed in just how you like it, and that’s a good thing. If you are working within Grafana Cloud, by contrast, you are using a heavily opinionated experience that our teams are building, managing, and provisioning. As a result, we serve up solutions that users can work with out of the box and can use to build their stack.

SLO walkthrough: measuring microservice performance

To improve reliability, we need to measure it, and to measure it we use SLOs (Service Level Objectives). Or at least, that’s what Google SRE has popularized. In practice, it can be difficult and time-consuming to identify the right things to measure, to get to the right data, and to surface the results in a way that engages the stakeholders and teams involved. And all this is especially hard as we scale our teams and applications across multiple technology stacks.

TL;DR Deep Linking Dashboards

If you’re an InfluxDB and InfluxDB UI user, you’ve almost certainly created dashboards. However, if you’re building dozens of dashboards in the InfluxDB UI, you might have come across the need to deep link related dashboards. In this tutorial we’ll learn how we can use the table view with Flux, string interpolation, and variables to deep link users to other dashboards.

Set up instant SNMP monitoring with the new SNMP integration in Grafana Cloud

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an internet protocol that is used to collect information about network devices and manage them. Most of the modern devices connected to a network support SNMP, such as routers, switches, servers, printers, and more. There are three different versions of SNMP (v1, v2, and v3). It most commonly operates on UDP ports 161 and 162. The most common versions being used are v1 and v2. The data can be collected from a network device through SNMP via polling.

Incident response: Unlocking knowledge and breaking down silos

In a world of monolithic applications and microservices, responding to incidents can be a painful process, involving multiple people with siloed knowledge jumping between different tools to find the relevant data and take action. Individuals within a business often hold the knowledge of how a particular component works, or how it depends on other services. The key to successfully responding to incidents is unlocking this knowledge and breaking down the silos between teams.

Release webinar: SquaredUp v5.6

SquaredUp v5.6 is all about the most highly requested features from our customers. Amongst all the improvements, you’ll see the new Tree View and Sunburst visualisations to help you spot root cause more quickly across your SCOM environment, Enterprise Applications and EAM-X monitored objects. Tune into this release webinar to see the new features in action!

Fixing SCOM Blind Spots - Introducing EAM-X, and loads more with SquaredUp v5.5!

In this webinar you’ll learn about all the latest updates included in SquaredUp v5.5, as well as an exclusive demo of our brand new licence tier, EAM-X. What is EAM-X? EAM-X is a new tier of SquaredUp built to extend SCOM’s visibility beyond Microsoft’s domain, making it the ultimate single pane of glass! Have you ever had an outage because of a dependency not monitored by SCOM? Even with Management Packs, SCOM has blind spots, and blind spots = business risk.