Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2024

Organizing your Grafana k6 performance testing suite: Best practices to get started

In 2017, we open sourced Grafana k6 and made its first beta available to everyone. This wasn’t our first rodeo — k6 marked the third load testing tool our team had developed over a decade. We had recognized the gaps in existing solutions, as well as the barriers that were hindering adoption in the developer community. The plan was simple yet ambitious: let’s build a tool developers actually enjoy using and that helps engineering teams build more reliable software.

PTO peace of mind: Sync Grafana OnCall with Google Calendar out-of-office events

Sometimes, the little things can make a big difference. We’ve added a new feature in Grafana Incident & Response Management (IRM) that lets you sync your Google Calendar out-of-office events with Grafana OnCall.

How Dell ISG Consolidated Observability Tooling Without Losing Functionality | Grafana Customer

In this recorded session, Brian Murphy, Technical StafF SRE at Dell Technologies shares how his team, Dell ISG consolidated Observability tooling without losing functionality using Grafana Cloud. The ISG team own “Northstar Tooling” which consists of Artifactory, Github Enterprise, Jenkins, and more. They also They also manage the Internal Cloud and k8s clusters, as well as all the hardware and networking that goes with it.

OpenTelemetry Looks Good To Me: Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir | GrafanaCON 2024 | Grafana

In this talk, D-EDGE Principal Engineer Clément Boudereau introduces you to Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics by using two simple Java applications, OpenTelemetry, and Grafana dashboards. Helpful links:☁️ Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, and traces. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more. We also have plans for every use case.

How to use the Grafana Operator: Managing a Grafana Cloud stack in Kubernetes

When deploying an application using Kubernetes, you get used to all your resources being manageable by describing them to the Kubernetes API. Whether it’s deployments, secrets, configurations, or entire machines, everything exists as code somewhere. Introducing a cloud service into such an environment often means introducing additional ways to configure it, which can become cumbersome, given the rising number of cloud services modern applications depend on.

The loser tree data structure: How to optimize merges and make your programs run faster

“Okay,” said Bryan Boreham, distinguished engineer at Grafana Labs, as he took to the stage at GopherCon 2023 in September. “Who loves algorithms?” A room full of software engineers raised their hands in response — and with that, Bryan kicked off his talk at the annual event dedicated to the Go open source programming language. GopherCon 2023, which took place in San Diego, Calif.

Going green: How to monitor your cloud carbon footprint using Kepler, Prometheus, and Grafana

At this point, the technical and operational benefits of cloud computing are pretty much indisputable. But the cloud industry, as a whole, still has a long way to go in one critical area: sustainability. In fact, as shocking as it may sound, it’s estimated that cloud data centers have a greater carbon footprint than the entire aviation industry. Ida Fürjesová and Niki Manoledaki, both software engineers at Grafana Labs, are passionate about helping to change that.

Structure of Logs (Part 2) | Zero to Hero: Loki | Grafana

Have you just discovered Grafana Loki? Zero to Hero: Loki is a series of videos that aims to take you through the basics of ingesting, your logs into Grafana Loki an open-source log aggregation solution. In this episode, it's all about the structure of logs. In part 2 we cover the different ways a log can be formatted. ☁️ Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, and traces. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more. We also have plans for every use case.

Grafana OnCall mobile app notifications: The new and improved experience for Android users

The Grafana OnCall mobile app is an essential tool for on-call engineers to monitor and respond to critical system events. Available for both iOS and Android, the app offers a range of features and notification settings that make the on-call experience easier and more intuitive — all in the palm of your hand.

A guide to scaling OpenTelemetry Collectors across multiple hosts via Ansible

OpenTelemetry has emerged as a key open source tool in the observability space. And as organizations use it to manage more of their telemetry data, they also need to understand how to make it work across their various environments. This guide is focused on scaling the OpenTelemetry Collector deployment across various Linux hosts to function as both gateways and agents within your observability architecture.

Managing users and Permissions in Grafana | Grafana for Beginners Ep 12

When using Grafana in a shared environment, managing users and permissions becomes necessary. Join Senior Developer Advocate, Lisa Jung to learn how! The following are covered in this episode: ☁️ Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, and traces. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more.

Beginners guide to - Visualizing Geomaps | Grafana

In this video, Grafana Developer Advocate Leandro Melendez describes the Geomaps panel visualization, they allow you to view and customize the world map using geospatial data. You can configure various overlay styles and map view settings to easily focus on the important location-based characteristics of the data.

Open source observability explained - the Grafana Labs stack

Wish you could have open source observability explained to you? Senior Developer Advocate Nicole van der Hoeven explains how all the OSS projects from the Grafana Labs stack work together and how the picture they're all building towards is continuous reliability. TIMESTAMPS: ☁️ Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, and traces. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more. We also have plans for every use case.

Grafana Cloud updates: explore metrics without PromQL, native OpenTelemetry log support, cool panels, and more

We are consistently releasing helpful updates and fun features in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform powered by the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). This month is no exception.

A guide to scaling Grafana Alloy deployments across multiple hosts

Last week we introduced Grafana Alloy, our distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector with built-in Prometheus pipelines and support for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. We’re excited to see the community embrace Alloy, and we want to help them use and scale it as easily as possible. Many developers that need to deploy and manage software across several hosts turn to Ansible for its ease of use and versatility.

Structure of Logs (Part 1) | Zero to Hero: Loki | Grafana

Have you just discovered Grafana Loki? Zero to Hero: Loki is a series of videos that aims to take you through the basics of ingesting, your logs into Grafana Loki an open-source log aggregation solution. In this episode, it's all about the structure of logs. In part 1 we cover what components make up a log entry. ☁️ Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, and traces. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more. We also have plans for every use case.

GrafanaCON 2024 Keynote: Grafana 11, Loki 3.0, Alloy, Golden Grot Awards, and more | Grafana

During GrafanaCON 2024, we came back together in person for the first time since 2019. Grafana Labs CEO and Co-founder Raj Dutt announced the winners of the Golden Grot community dashboard awards, and members of our engineering team made some exciting announcements around our open source observability projects including Loki 3.0 and Alloy. And Torkel Ödegaard, the creator of Grafana, unveiled what’s new in Grafana 11, with some demos.

Why companies choose Grafana Cloud for their hosted observability platform

Three different businesses, one shared problem: SailPoint, Kushki, and Flexcity were all looking for a hosted solution to help them optimize their telemetry storage, gain more insights from their observability strategy, and keep costs manageable. But what they gained from migrating to Grafana Cloud and working with Grafana Labs was much more. “The engineering team is super sharp. They’re experts. This is the best of the best," said Omar Lopez, head of the observability team from SailPoint.

Grafana Cloud security: Three common cloud security myths debunked

Grafana Cloud offers organizations an end-to-end observability platform, without the overhead of building and maintaining their own observability stack. We’re constantly shipping new Grafana Cloud features to ensure users get the most out of the fully managed platform, which is powered by our open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics).

Grafana 11 release: The latest in visualizations, Scenes-powered dashboards, simple access controls, and more

At the opening keynote of GrafanaCON 2024, attendees in Amsterdam got a sneak peek at some of the latest features in Grafana 11, which is now available in preview. Grafana: download now! For those of you who couldn’t score a ticket to the sold-out event, don’t worry — we have a roundup of all the latest updates to visualizations that make it easier than ever to create beautiful dashboards in Grafana.

Loki 3.0 release: Bloom filters, native OpenTelemetry support, and more!

Welcome to the next chapter of Grafana Loki! After five years of dedicated development, countless hours of refining, and the support of an incredible community, we are thrilled to announce that Grafana Loki 3.0 is now generally available. The journey from 2.0 to 3.0 saw a lot of impressive changes to Loki. Loki is now more performant, and it’s capable of handling larger scales — all while remaining true to its roots of efficiency and simplicity.

Find your logs data with Explore Logs: No LogQL required!

We are thrilled to announce the preview of Explore Logs, a new way to browse your logs without writing LogQL. In this post, we’ll cover why we built Explore Logs and we’ll dive deeper into some of its features, including at-a-glance breakdowns by label, detected fields, and our new pattern detection. At the end, we’ll tell you how you can try Explore Logs for yourself today. But let’s start from the beginning — with good old LogQL.

Introducing an OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with built-in Prometheus pipelines: Grafana Alloy

In the opening keynote of GrafanaCON 2024, we announced our newest OSS project: Grafana Alloy, our open source distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector. Alloy is a telemetry collector that is 100% OTLP compatible and offers native pipelines for OpenTelemetry and Prometheus telemetry formats, supporting metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. Some of you may be thinking: Wait, another collector?

Legacy alerting removal: What you need to know about upgrading to Grafana Alerting

Two years ago, when we launched Grafana 9, we announced the deprecation of legacy alerting and introduced Grafana Alerting, the new default alerting system in all editions of Grafana. Since then we have invested in Grafana Alerting, making it easier to create and manage your alerts. Along the way we have also worked to make the transition from legacy alerting to Grafana Alerting as seamless as possible in preparation for the time when we remove legacy alerting altogether from Grafana.

How the Prometheus community is investing in OpenTelemetry

Goutham Veeramachaneni, a product manager at Grafana Labs, and Carrie Edwards, a senior software engineer at Grafana Labs, are both contributors to the Prometheus open source project. This post, which they wrote together, was originally published on the Prometheus.io blog in March 2024. The OpenTelemetry project is an observability framework and toolkit designed to create and manage telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs.

Creating alerts with Grafana | Grafana for Beginners Ep 11

When observing your data with Grafana, you don't need to be glued to your dashboard 24/7. Join Senior Developer Advocate, Lisa Jung to learn how to set up Grafana to keep an eye on your data and alert you if something needs your attention! The following are covered in this episode: ☁️ Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with Grafana dashboards, metrics, logs, and traces. Our forever-free tier includes access to 10k metrics, 50GB logs, 50GB traces and more. We also have plans for every use case.

Beginners guide - Visualizing Logs | Grafana

In this video, Grafana Developer Advocate Leandro Melendez describes the logs visualization panel, which shows log lines from data sources that support logs, such as Elastic, Influx, and Loki. Typically you would use this visualization next to a graph visualization to display the log output of a related process.

Simplified routing in Grafana Alerting: Easy, secure, and powerful

With great power comes great… complexity? When we introduced Grafana Alerting a few years ago, it included a powerful routing feature that teams could use to send alerts to various contact points. Unfortunately, this functionality also came with a fair bit of complexity and an unfamiliar UX. This prevented many users from adopting it, but we’re still big believers in how it can help users.