Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Managing on-call schedules and escalation chains, especially across many teams, can get cumbersome and error prone. This can be especially difficult without as-code workflows. Here on the Grafana OnCall team, we’re focused on making Grafana OnCall as easy to use as possible. We want to make it easier to reduce errors with your on-call schedules, create schedule and escalation templates quickly, and fit on-call management into your existing as-code patterns.

Someone once described dashboards to me as “expensive TV for software engineers.” At first, I stood there quietly shocked—dashboards had informed many root cause analyses (RCAs) in my life as a developer.

PromQL is a flexible language designed to make it easy for users to perform ad-hoc queries against their data. By default, Prometheus indexes all of the fields in each metric except for source and target, which are not indexed by default. Prometheus is an open-source tool that lets you monitor Kubernetes clusters and applications. It collects data from monitoring targets by scraping metrics HTTP endpoints.

We are happy to announce that file provisioning for Grafana Alerting has arrived in Grafana 9.1. This feature enables you to configure your whole alerting stack using files on disk, as you may already do with data sources or dashboards. The Terraform Grafana provider has also been updated to allow the provisioning of Grafana Alerting resources.

With the Grafana 8.5 release, we introduced the concept of service accounts. Now with the Grafana 9.1 release, we’re making service accounts generally available. This is a project that came out of technical necessity, but it has given us the opportunity to reflect on API tokens and machine-to-machine interaction across Grafana Labs.

If an energy cable running through the waters surrounding Denmark gets damaged by a passing vessel, does it make a sound? Yes. . . and it’s the ping of a Grafana alert at the offices of Energinet, an independent public enterprise owned by the Danish Ministry of Climate, Energy, and Utilities.

Traces, logs, and metrics provide inherently different views into a system, which is why correlating between them is important. With features like exemplar support, trace to logs, and span references, you can quickly jump between most telemetry signals in Grafana. With the release of Grafana 9.1, we’re improving Grafana’s ability to correlate different signals by adding the functionality to link between traces and metrics.

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new feature we’ve been working on in Grafana 9.1: public dashboards 🎉. The public dashboards feature will allow you to share your Grafana dashboard with anyone, even if they’re not part of your Grafana organization. Historically, the only way that someone could share a dashboard externally was taking a one-time snapshot 📸, or disabling all authorization for their Grafana instance 😬.