Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We often hear from Grafana Cloud users who are asking for guidelines on how to write better alerts on synthetic monitoring metrics and get notified when synthetic monitoring detects a problem. We already ship a predefined alert in Grafana Cloud synthetic monitoring. A predefined alert that we ship is alerting on the probe_all_success_sum metric and makes use of the alert sensitivity config to create multiple Grafana Cloud alerting rules. Check out synthetic monitoring alerting docs for details.

Attracting and retaining top developer talent is a No. 1 priority for a lot of companies these days, including location technology company TomTom. As both the builder of the world’s largest developer community and an employer of thousands of developers, TomTom is always looking for developer-friendly tools to help their employees feel productive, efficient, and inspired.

I’m an engineering manager at Grafana Labs serving on the Grafana Enterprise Operations team. I joined Grafana Labs in December 2020 and I just celebrated my first year at the company. The last 12+ months have been filled with the most exciting and rewarding experiences in my career, full of new opportunities and learnings. More importantly, I am lucky enough to meet and work with the wonderful people at Grafana Labs.

One of the common challenges when doing performance testing is the difficulty of correlating the metrics of your application with your testing results. Having available QA, infrastructure, and application metrics together allows engineering teams to better understand the behavior of their systems during the testing, helping to detect and prevent potential issues in their applications.

Legacy logging solutions simply couldn’t keep up with the complex, hyperconverged regional infrastructure at Civo, a Kubernetes service provider that enables users to launch k8s clusters within 90 seconds. “With our infrastructure and application deployment getting more complex and more distributed, we needed our logging solution and our entire observability stack to scale up with our needs,” said Anaïs Urlichs, Site Reliability Engineer at Civo.

Grafana Labs has had a long commitment to educating our customers and community about all of our open source technologies and products, with our community Slack, webinars, conferences, documentation, and of course, this blog. In 2021, we decided that it was time to create a formal education program to provide more structured, repeatable, and scalable learning experiences – all while providing the same compelling and quality content our community is accustomed to.

Grafana Tempo has had quite a year. Just eight months after it was announced at ObservabilityCON 2020, the open source tracing solution went GA. Since the Tempo team released v1.0 in June, we have ingested more than 39 trillion spans, a 26x increase from last year. We also introduced Grafana Enterprise Traces, which is powered by Tempo, to the Grafana Enterprise Stack.

This year, we were excited to deliver the easiest version of Grafana Loki to use yet. With Loki 2.4, the Loki team introduced a simple, scalable deployment, and over the past 12 months, we added lots of great new features. Not to mention, we launched Grafana Enterprise Logs, a new addition to the Grafana Enterprise Stack that’s powered by Loki. But none of this would have been possible without our active community: In 2021, Loki had 166 contributors and 823 PRs in GItHub.

Numbers don’t lie — and the data shows that in a year in which we, once again, endured unpredictable changes, Grafana experienced unparalleled success. In June, we introduced Grafana 8.0, which included unified alerting, new visualizations, real-time streaming, and more. Since then we have introduced a host of new features as well as new data source plugins that only reinforce Grafana’s commitment to our “big tent” philosophy.

Here’s a look back at the releases, products, community stories, and major announcements that defined another incredible year for Grafana Labs.