Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2021

Troubleshoot problems using GitLab activity data with the new plugin for Grafana

GitLab is one of the most popular web-based DevOps life-cycle tools in the world, used by millions as a Git-repository manager and for issue tracking, continuous integration, and deployment purposes. Today, we’re pleased to announce the first beta release of the GitLab data source plugin, which is intended to help users find interesting insights from their GitLab activity data.

You should know about... transformations in Grafana

Transformations were introduced in Grafana v7.0, and I’d like to remind you that you can use them to do some really nifty things with your data. All performed right in the browser! Transformations process the result set of a query before it’s passed on for visualization. They allow you to join separate time series together, do maths across queries, and more. My number one use case is usually doing maths across multiple data sources.

The new Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring plugin brings the SaaS formerly known as SignalFx to your Grafana dashboards

Greetings! This is Mike reporting from the Solutions Engineering team at Grafana Labs. In previous posts, you might have read our beginner’s guide to distributed tracing and how it can help to increase your application’s performance. In this post, we are back to talk about metrics and showcase another one of our newest favorite Enterprise plugins: Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring (formerly known as SignalFx)!

The 3 major benefits that Grafana Cloud customers get from our hosted Prometheus service

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get what you need for observability: Prometheus and Graphite for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for tracing, all integrated within Grafana and managed by the Grafana Labs team. You can go from zero to beautiful graphs, insightful logs, and preconfigured alerts in minutes. Built with modern distributed systems techniques, Grafana Cloud allows you to grow with your applications and infrastructure and easily scale past 100M+ metrics.

Introducing Grafana Enterprise Logs, a core part of the Grafana Enterprise Stack integrated observability solution

Today, we are launching a new Grafana Labs product, Grafana Enterprise Logs. Powered by the Grafana Loki open source project for cloud native log aggregation, and built by the maintainers of the project, this offering is an exciting addition to our growing self-managed observability stack tailored for enterprises.

The essential config settings you should use so you won't drop logs in Loki

In this post, we’re going to talk about tips for securing the reliability of Loki’s write path (where Loki ingests logs). More succinctly, how can Loki ensure we don’t lose logs? This is a common starting point for those who have tried out the single binary Loki deployment and decided to build a more production-ready deployment. Now, let’s look at the two tools Loki uses to prevent log loss.

Instrumenting a .NET web API using OpenTelemetry, Tempo, and Grafana Cloud

OpenTelemetry is a CNCF project that standardizes observability (logs, metrics, and traces) across many languages and tools. Today we will look at how we can use the OpenTelemetry .NET library to instrument a .NET 5.0 web API, to offload traces to Tempo and logs to Loki in Grafana Cloud. Grafana Cloud now has a free plan. Set up your account and follow along!

How the new time series panel brings major performance improvements and new visualization features to Grafana 7.4

In Grafana 7.0, we introduced a new panel architecture to enhance the UX and visualization options and create a more consistent experience across Grafana. In Grafana 7.4, we expanded on that foundation and introduced the next-generation graph panel called Time series panel, which is currently in beta. The Time series panel uses the panel architecture of Grafana 7.0 and integrates with field options, overrides, and transformations.

How I monitor my OpenWrt router with Grafana Cloud and Prometheus

I’ve been an open source fan and user for many, many years, going back to before we defined the term “open source” and we called it “free software.” Whenever and wherever possible I prefer to have control over the software I run on my devices. Case in point: My internet router runs OpenWrt, which is a free/open source Linux operating system designed to replace the software provided by the router’s manufacturer.

The Splunk plugin for Grafana now supports data links for jumping directly from logs to traces

Hey there! This is Éamon Ryan from the Solutions Engineering team. Very recently the Splunk data source plugin, which is available with a Grafana Enterprise license, had a new release: v2.1.0. While it added a few good bug fixes for edge cases, the biggest change, I think, was the addition of support for data links! Data links actually show up in a few places inside Grafana.

Grafana 7.4 released: Next-generation graph panel with 30 fps live streaming, Prometheus exemplar support, trace to logs, and more

Grafana v7.4 has been released! The big news for Grafana 7.4 is the next-generation graph panel called time series, which is in beta. A high-performance visualization based on the uPlot library, it uses the new panel architecture introduced in Grafana 7.0 and integrates with field options, overrides, and transformations.

Auto-instrumenting a Java Spring Boot application for traces and logs using OpenTelemetry and Grafana Tempo

Auto-instrumentation is a subject I have not had much experience with. Here at Grafana Labs, we primarily develop in Go, which doesn’t afford such luxuries. However, there is an enormous amount of interest from the community in Java auto-instrumentation, so I set out to determine what was possible using the shiny new OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation libraries.

Real-time monitoring of Formula 1 telemetry data on Kubernetes with Grafana, Apache Kafka, and Strimzi

Data streaming is important for getting insights in real time and reacting to events as fast as possible. Its application is wide, from banking transactions and website click analytics to IoT devices and motorsports. The last example represents a really interesting use case.

Farewell, worldPing. Hello, Grafana Cloud synthetic monitoring!

Many of us get sentimental about past projects we’ve worked on…for me it is a mobile dashboard that leveraged ML/AI to help a sales team make quicker decisions while in the field (nerdy, I know…but it was one of my first projects as a UX Designer when I was starting out my career, and I have many fond memories about this project). For many members of the team at Grafana Labs, that sentimental project is worldPing.