Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re already familiar with distributed tracing, you know that spans are the building blocks of traces. But are you sleeping on what span events can do for you? First, you may need a wake-up call as to what a span event even is. While spans represent units of work or operation within a trace, a span event is a unique point in time during the span’s duration.

Let’s cut to the chase: Managing metric volumes at scale is hard. In fact, when we asked the open source observability community about their biggest concerns in this year’s Grafana Labs Observability Survey, the top four responses — cost, complexity, cardinality, and signal-to-noise ratio — can all be tied back to exponential growth in telemetry data.

As a site reliability engineer, you need constant vigilance and a keen eye for detail if you want to manage your Kubernetes infrastructure effectively. As part of that effort, you need to see the historical data from your pods, nodes, and clusters — even after they’ve been deleted or recreated. Many SREs rely on kubectl for this, and while it’s indispensable for real-time Kubernetes management, it presents some significant challenges with historical data.

Identity providers (IdPs) such as Okta play a crucial role in enterprise environments by providing seamless authentication and authorization experiences for users accessing organizational resources. These interactions generate a massive volume of event logs, containing valuable information like user details, geographical locations, IP addresses, and more. These logs are essential for security teams, especially in operations, because they’re used to detect and respond to incidents effectively.

As we continue adding to our growing catalog of more than 100 plugins for Grafana, we have been focused on developing data sources for Grafana that are more purpose-built for the respective technologies. One example has been the recent update to our core Prometheus data source. We have deprecated AWS authentication from the original Prometheus data source, and we created a new dedicated Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus plugin that will specifically cater to the AWS use case.