Grafana Agent v0.38 has hit the digital shelves just before the holiday season! 🧑🎄 The elves over at Grafana Labs have been quietly working on Grafana Agent, with more than 50 updates for all SREs and developers to use — no matter if you’re on the naughty or nice list. This includes new features, improvements, bug fixes, and significant ease-of-use changes.
Learning about the past helps us understand the present, and even predict the future. So, whether you are monitoring CPU usage or how long your IoT device was powered on and then off, at some point, you might want to know the difference of a value over time. InfluxDB is an open source database for storing and retrieving time series data. Thanks to its own query languages — flux and InfluxQL — it provides different and powerful ways to analyze data.
Here's the Grafana Office Hours with Matt Durham and Paul Balogh, where we discuss Grafana Agent Flow mode and how it's better than static mode: https://youtube.com/live/-_SsFLoJvoc
And check out the documentation for flow mode here: https://grafana.com/docs/agent/latest/flow/
The single pane of glass is perhaps the most enduring and elusive goal of enterprise IT operations teams. When we polled our customers a couple of years ago, out of 184 respondents, 99% of them rated it as important to their business – with 64% indicating “extremely important”. The shared dream is to have: But unfortunately, the single pane of glass has become a bit of myth.
Every day, we generate tons of data, so much so that we cannot analyze them manually anymore. Visualization is a process by which the generated data will be broken down into smaller packages. Visualization extensively relies on observability and the triumvirate of Logs, Metrics and Traces. When it comes to visualizations and dashboards, Kibana and Grafana are two prominent names in the market. What makes them stand apart from their peers is their ability to conceive top-notch analytics charts.
At SquaredUp, we have been debating how the senior leadership team can monitor the ‘health’ of our engineering teams. To do this, we decided to create a dashboard that could represent this for a team – but first, we needed to figure out what to measure. Our goal was to better understand our teams to inform which actions to take to support them and make them a happier and more productive bunch.
Last week, we were very excited to host our first ever SquaredUp Virtual Customer Workshop! We’d received so much positive feedback on the intimate in-person workshop we ran in the UK last month that we wanted to extend the invitation worldwide – by recreating the experience virtually. Using the digital conferencing app Gather Town, we were pleased to welcome 23 SquaredUp customers from 12 countries to our virtual “SquaredUp Town”.
Grafana is an open-source web application for visualizing data. You can query your data, create visuals, and receive alerts to better understand what you have. Some people think of Grafana as a Kubernetes-only tool, but in reality, it’s simply a data visualization tool that became popular within the Kubernetes ecosystem, especially when combined with Prometheus. In this post, I’ll focus on a very specific part of Grafana: the dashboards.
Since we introduced role-based access control (RBAC) in Grafana 9.0, users — and later, service accounts — have been required to have an assigned role that includes a basic set of permissions. This sometimes led organizations to create users and service accounts that had more permissions than necessary. As a result, Grafana administrators had to make additional adjustments to users’ permissions on a case-by-case basis.
When it comes to observability, we’ve found that most organizations have ~20 tools installed in their IT environments. With so many tools, it’s difficult for IT leaders to gain insight into how their tools are performing and determine how much value ITOps is bringing to the organization.
When you use OpenTelemetry SDKs to collect logs, metrics, and traces from infrastructure or an application, you’ll find many references to people using Grafana Agent and OpenTelemetry Collector. They start with an application or infrastructure that sends telemetry, and that data is sent to a collector, which then sends it to a backend like Grafana that may perform many functions, including visualization.
Unlocking the full potential of observability and tracing in modern software ecosystems has become imperative for businesses striving to deliver improved reliability and user experience. In this comprehensive roundup, we will dive into the world of Jaeger-incorporated observability and tracing dashboards, offering a curated selection of the best use cases that empower DevOps teams, engineers, and developers to gain unparalleled insights into the inner workings of their applications.
Observability isn’t just about watching for errors or monitoring for basic health signals. Instead, it goes deeper so you can understand the “why” behind the behaviors within your system. CI/CD observability plays a key part in that. It’s about gaining an in-depth view of the entire pipeline of your continuous integration and deployment systems — looking at every code check-in, every test, every build, and every deployment.
ObservabilityCON 2023 took place in London this week, showcasing all the latest and greatest trends in open source observability. Following the opening keynote, the event featured a range of breakout sessions — led by both Grafana Labs experts and members of the Grafana OSS community — that explored observability best practices and lessons learned.
The OpenTelemetry project provides many different components and instrumentations that support different languages and telemetry signals. However, new users often find it hard to pick the right ones and configure them properly for their specific use cases. For this reason, OpenTelemetry defines the concept of a distribution, which is a tailored and customized version of OpenTelemetry components. Here at Grafana Labs, we are all-in on OpenTelemetry.
The OpenTelemetry project provides many different components and instrumentations that support different languages and telemetry signals. However, new users often find it hard to pick the right ones and configure them properly for their specific use cases. For this reason, OpenTelemetry defines the concept of a distribution, which is a tailored and customized version of OpenTelemetry components. Here at Grafana Labs, we are all-in on OpenTelemetry.
Big news! Microsoft have just dropped Azure Monitor SCOM Managed Instance (SCOM MI), their cloud-based alternative to SCOM. It’s fully Microsoft managed, and so it promises to take the headache out of deploying, scaling, and managing your SCOM Management Groups. Read Microsoft’s announcement blog to learn all about it.
When we began offering Grafana Cloud Metrics, we set a service level agreement (SLA) for 99.5% of requests to be completed within a few seconds. So we built an alert that would go off if more than 0.5% of requests were slower than a couple of seconds within a five-minute moving window. Sounds reasonable, right?
During the opening keynote of ObservabilityCON 2023 in London, we announced a range of new updates to make it easier and faster for the open source observability community to get started and scale their observability stacks.
As more organizations adopt observability at massive scale, they have also been grappling with rising costs. Over the past 12 months, we have been working on different solutions to help our users better understand and manage their observability stack, not to mention the bills that come with scaling it.
Just two months after introducing the public preview of Grafana Beyla, we are excited to announce the general availability of the open source project with the release of Grafana Beyla 1.0 at ObservabilityCON 2023 today. We’ve worked hard in the last two months to stabilize, stress test, and refine the features that were part of the public preview of this open source eBPF auto-instrumentation tool.
At Grafana Labs, our mission has always been to help our users and customers understand the behavior of their applications and services. Over the past two years, the biggest needs we’ve heard from our customers have been to make it easier to understand their observability data, to extend observability into the application layer, and to get deeper, contextualized analytics.
The Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics) offers the freedom and flexibility for monitoring application performance. But we’ve also heard from many of our users and customers that you need a solution that makes it easier and faster to get started with application monitoring.
You'll often hear us saying "everyone loves a dashboard", and that's most certainly true, but nobody loves staring at a screen all day waiting for something to happen. Real magic is when your awesome dashboard comes to you, where you need it, when you need it. Over the last few months we've introduced a bunch of powerful features to make "taking action" as simple as possible... Monitors let you define the health of your data so you can see at a glance if something isn't right.
At Grafana Labs we meet our users where they are. We run our services in every major cloud provider, so they can have what they need, where they need it. But of course, different providers offer different services — and different challenges. When we first landed on AWS in 2022 and began using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), we went with Cluster Autoscaler (CA) as our autoscaling tool of choice.
As Grafana evolved over the years, so did our panel headers. In our quest for improvement, we continually added design options that created more comprehensive panels, but also an increasingly complex interface. It was a process of continual adaptation without a roadmap — which, though well-intentioned, began to result in unforeseen challenges.
At Grafana Labs, we want to empower our fellow Grafanistas and the community to get the most out of the Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). As part of this effort, we recently launched a new Grafana developer portal. And now, we’re pleased to announce the launch of the Saga Design System, which establishes a shared visual language for all of Grafana Labs’ offerings.
Starting around June this year, we upgraded our Grafana databases in Grafana Cloud from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8, due to MySQL 5.7 reaching end-of-life in October. This project involved tens of thousands of customer databases across dozens of MySQL database servers, multiple cloud providers, and many Kubernetes clusters.
Defining multiple environments in Argo CD and promoting an application between them is one of most popular questions for companies that adopt GitOps for their applications. While we have offered several guidelines in the past for organizing your GitOps environments, today we are taking it further by announcing a complete product that helps you visualize the full lifecycle of an application as it moves through different stages. Meet the new Codefresh GitOps Environment Dashboard!
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023 is just around the corner, and the OSS and cloud native community is eagerly anticipating the event, which will take place November 6 - 9 in Chicago.
In the ever-changing field of artificial intelligence, OpenAI is consistently seen as a leader in innovation. Its AI models, starting with GPT-3 and now with GPT-4, are already used extensively in software development and content creation, and they’re expected to usher in entire sets of new systems in the future.
Grafana Tempo 2.3 has been unleashed upon the world, bringing with it the latest iteration of the vParquet backend! Tempo 2.3 has a little bit of everything, but the headline item here is vParquet3 and new features that improve search speeds. Watch the video above for all the details, or continue reading to get a quick overview of the latest updates in Tempo. If you’re looking for something more in-depth, don’t hesitate to jump into the changelog or our Grafana Tempo 2.3 release notes.