This week we highlight Grafana project contributors from Hacktoberfest, share an article we published earlier this week on monitoring devices in your home with Prometheus and Grafana, how SoftwareMill manages their dashboards across environments and more.

All Things Open, a conference focused on open source technologies, was held in Raleigh, NC this week and was bursting at the seams with over 4,500 attendees. Grafana Labs’ own Tom Wilkie gave his RED Method: How to instrument your services talk to a standing-room only crowd. We were excited to speak at and sponsor ATO and look forward to next year.

This is the second part of a series on the CloudReady dashboards and visualizations. The first part covered basics like Overviews, Refresh, and Layout settings. In this second part, we’ll cover more advanced creation and usage of dashboards. In part 3 and 4 we’ll cover actual widgets and how they can be used.

This week we’ll learn about the new Google Stackdriver core datasource in Grafana, dive into the new Postgres query editor and share some best practices.

This week the Grafana Labs team was busy prepping for the Grafana v5.3 stable release! Grafana v5.3 adds Stackdriver as a core datasource, a new graphical query editor for Postgres, enhancements to TV and kiosk mode, and a lot more. See the release section for a list of all the new features.

Grafana v5.3 brings new features, many enhancements and bug fixes. This article will detail the major new features and enhancements.

This week we released Grafana 5.3.0beta-3 in prep for a stable release that should be available next week. In addition to details on the new beta, we have a lot of new and updated plugins to share, and our weekly roundup of Grafana-related articles from around the Internet.

Big news this week - GrafanaCon early bird tickets are now on sale! We’ve released a limited number of early bird tickets, so grab yours before they’re sold out. Also, call for proposals is open until October 15, so don’t wait until the last minute to submit your talk. We’ve gotten some great proposals already, but the more the merrier. Keep an eye out at grafanacon.org for more updates.

Managing the end-user experience has become the basis of competition in the digital services world. Most IT organizations today are looking for a portal for managing the performance of digital business services – and a portal is much more than a simple dashboard.

This week we share articles covering Grafana’s alpha Explore UI, the many ways Logicify uses Grafana, building your own centralized monitoring stack, and more.