We saw Cameron’s impressive dashboard in a Grafana Experts Facebook group and asked him to break it down for us. When friends and visitors see my personal home dashboard in my kitchen, they’re normally of the opinion that it’s “really neat” and looks “impressive.” Often that’s what they take away from it. It’s “cool”… and as much as that may be true, that is not its purpose.
More frequent releases! We continue to march Loki towards the first GA release, and to help that process we are going to target bi-weekly to weekly releases, depending on changes. - Ed Welch 08/12/2019 My mistake, there was clearly a typo in my previous post, and when I said bi-weekly I clearly meant bi-monthly. ;) The good news, however, is that the project has been very busy and there are some very exciting new features in Loki v0.4.0!
This morning, we announced that Grafana Labs has raised $24 million in Series A funding. Here’s what that means for our open source community. Our company was established five years ago to accelerate the adoption of the Grafana project and to build a sustainable business around it, which could in turn help support the community.
Grafana Labs turned 5 on Oct. 4. And as a remote-first company, we decided it would be a great excuse to give our team members, who are scattered across 22 different countries, a chance to take their conversations off Slack and celebrate together in person. In London, Berlin, Stockholm, New York City, and Bangalore, Grafana Labs engineers, sales teams, solutions staff, HR, and marketing – everyone! – gathered to meet and mingle, to reconnect and reminisce.
In the industry, the long-held theory behind observability is that a successful stack consists of three key components – metrics, logging, and tracing. “This is a mental model for people who are often new to observability which helps them get a handle on what they need to implement to be successful,” said Grafana Labs VP of Product Tom Wilkie during a keynote presentation he delivered at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in May alongside Red Hat Software Engineer Frederic Branczyk.
At Grafana Labs, we are working to make it easier to visualize data that comes from many different sources and in many different ways. We know that our customers are usually using more than one system to track what’s going on within an infrastructure. If you are a system administrator, or even a curious developer, there is a very high probability that you are monitoring and quite regularly reviewing your logs to find valuable and important information in them.
I am a junior software engineer in Slovakia. I feel incredibly lucky that I’ve had this amazing opportunity to join Grafana Labs, as it was among the top companies that I’ve ever dreamed about working for. The only thing that I was slightly scared of was the fact that Grafana Labs is remote-first, and I would be working full-time from home.
Since we released Loki, our log aggregation system, our customers have been asking about using it not only for logs but also for less frequent events. Even though the strength of Loki lies in its ease of operation and automatic labeling for high-frequency logs, it can also be used for events out of the box.
Grafana Labs has 8+ clusters in GKE running 270 nodes of various sizes, and all the hosted metrics and hosted log Grafana Cloud offerings are run on 16-core, 64-gig machines. At the recent All Systems Go! conference in Berlin, David Kaltschmidt, Director, User Experience, gave a talk about what monitoring these clusters and servers looks like at Grafana Labs and shared some best practices.
Earlier this month, Ivana Huckova, one of Grafana’s junior developers, wrote an article about how to contribute to Grafana as a junior dev. As an open-source project supported by engineers around the world, Grafana strongly encourages anyone to contribute. And ICYMI, there are many opportunities to help: Testing the UI and reporting issues, finding and fixing bugs, and improving the documentation are just a few.
