Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Grafana Mimir, our new open source time series database, introduces a horizontally scalable split-and-merge compactor that can easily handle a large number of series. In a previous blog post, we described how we did extensive load testing to ensure high performance at 1 billion active series. In this article, we will discuss the challenges with the existing Prometheus and Cortex compactors and the new features of Grafana Mimir’s compactor.

Forget the latest tech gadgets and the newest products. One of the most talked about trends in observability right now? “SLOs have really become a buzzword, and everyone wants them,” said Grafana Labs principal software engineer Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein on a recent episode of “Grafana’s Big Tent,” our new podcast about people, community, tech, and tools around observability.

Since we launched Grafana Mimir — the most scalable, most performant open source time series database in the world — we have answered many of your questions about our latest open source project, including how to pronounce it. (All together now: /mɪ’mir/.) We have walked through how we scaled Grafana Mimir to 1 billion active series. And we will be hosting webinars to showcase cutting-edge features like query sharding and the two-stage compactor.

In 2019, Alexander Mann was working in the microchip industry, putting in 12-hour shifts that left no time for him to tend to his large vegetable garden. “I started looking for ways that I could remotely water or check on my plants,” he says. Products that could help him were either too costly for a hobby gardener or required special internet connections, so Mann decided to learn about IoT and create his own setup.

On the heels of launching our new open source TSDB Grafana Mimir, we are excited to introduce Grafana Enterprise Metrics 2.0. GEM 2.0 is built on top of Grafana Mimir 2.0, our easy-to-operate, high-scale database which we’ve shown can handle upwards of 1 billion active series. That means that GEM 2.0 inherits all of the highlights of Mimir, including easy deployment, native multi-tenancy, high availability, durable long-term metrics storage, and exceptional query performance.

I’m very excited to tell you all about the latest Grafana Loki installment, 2.5! A huge amount of work, nearly 500 PRs, has gone into Loki between v2.4 and now. The major themes for this release are improved performance, continuing ease of operations, and more ways to ingest your logs. I usually find myself the most excited about performance improvements, so let’s start there.

Last week, we announced our new open source TSDB, Grafana Mimir, which lets you scale your metrics monitoring to 1 billion active series and beyond. The announcement was greeted with a lot of excitement and interest – and some questions too. Namely: Really, 1 billion? Yes, really!

Today, I’m happy to share that Grafana Labs has closed a $240 million Series D round of investment. This is a major milestone for us that goes well beyond the number of dollars. First, we are grateful to our internal team (affectionately called Grafanistas) and our community of users and customers. Without them, we would not have been given this opportunity.

Mike Szczys is a Developer Relations Engineer at Golioth. His deep love of microcontrollers began in the early 2000s, growing from the desire to make more of the BEAM robotics he was building. When he’s not reading data sheets, he’s busy as an orchestra musician in Madison, Wisconsin. At Golioth, a commercial IoT development platform, we love using the power of Grafana to easily visualize data from IoT installations where tens, hundreds, or even thousands of devices are reporting back.

When Grafana Labs CEO and co-founder Raj Dutt announced to the team that the company would be launching Grafana Mimir, we knew that along with the public announcement, we would want to publish a Q&A. We collected questions from Grafanistas and Raj has answered them here.