Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

These days we spend a lot of time talking about modernizing our stack, modernizing our architectures, using new application components, modern application life cycles, etc. So, what is this all about and why do we spend so much time talking about it? First, there is a lot of self-serving vendor speak involved…starting with cloud providers and closely followed by open source commercialization shops and commercial ISVs (ourselves included) who have to spin the world in their own image.

The situation is all too familiar: You get an alert. You look at your metrics and your dashboards to try and find out what the cause might be and when the incident actually started (instead of when the alert happened). Then you have to go somewhere else to look at logs because eventually you need more data.

As Stephen Marsland once said, “if data had mass, the earth would be a black hole.” A vast part of the immense amount of structured and unstructured data that we call “Big Data” is nothing but machine-originated log data. Logs are generated for a lot of different purposes – from security to debugging and troubleshooting. They constitute a gold mine of useful information and actionable insights if properly stored, managed, and analyzed.

While Logz.io provides Kibana — the ELK Stack’s visualization tool — as part of its service, a lot of users have asked us to support Grafana. One of the leading open source visualization tools today, Grafana has some added value when compared to Kibana, especially around visualizing time-series data.

A very useful feature of Grafana is the ability to display dashboards and playlists on a large TV. Documentation on how to do this is sparse, which inspired this tutorial and also led to automating the process.

April was one of our busiest and exciting month of events so far. Here’s a recap of where we were, what we saw and where you can catch us next. While writing this, we are on the road at both DockerCon and Open Infrastructure Summit so if you are there, don’t hesitate to find our pink shirts to meet us and get a demo!

The Internet of Things has transformed people’s lives, enabling everything from “smart homes” to remote health monitoring. And now a startup called AMMP Technologies is using IoT – and Grafana – to help bring electricity to rural Africa. Hendrik Broering, COO and cofounder of AMMP, told the audience at GrafanaCon L.A. about a village in Tanzania called Changombe, with a population of about 2,000 and no access to electricity until 2017.