In my previous blogs in the Dashboard Server Learning Path, we looked at working with the Web API tile and the PowerShell tile. In this instalment, let’s try the SQL tile. This tile will let you connect to any SQL database and run a SQL query straight from SquaredUp. This tile is also available in both the SquaredUp for SCOM and Azure products, so I have some familiarity with it already.
We built Grafana Enterprise Metrics (GEM) to empower centralized observability teams to provide a multi-tenanted, horizontally scalable Prometheus-as-a-Service experience for their end users. The GEM plugin for Grafana is a key piece of realizing this vision. It provides a point-and-click way for teams operating GEM to understand the state of their cluster and manage settings for each of the tenants within it.
I have been using Grafana for almost four years now, and in that time it has become my go-to tool for my application observability needs. Especially now that Grafana allows you to also view logs and traces, you can easily have all three pillars of observability surfaced through Grafana. As a result, when I started working on the Elixir PromEx library, having Grafana be the end target for the metrics dashboards made perfect sense.
Since we launched Grafana Enterprise Metrics (GEM), our self-hosted Prometheus service, last year, we’ve seen customers run it at great scale. We have clusters with more than 100 million metrics, and GEM’s new scalable compactor can handle an estimated 650 million active series. Still, we wanted to run performance tests that would more definitively show GEM’s horizontal scalability and allow us to get more accurate TCO estimates.
A trip to the DMV — and a realization that there had to be a better, more modern way for the system to work — sparked the idea for PayIt, a secure cloud service provider for digital government that launched in 2013. The company’s mission is to help state, local, and government agencies reach their constituents better and more effectively, shifting the reliance from in-office payments to digital ones.
Amongst all the cool features of SquaredUp Dashboard Server, the coolest kid on the block is probably the PowerShell tile. The reason is simple – PowerShell is easy, it’s awesome, and it’s powerful! You can not only retrieve data from the source (like the APIs), but you can also manipulate that data, work with variables, loop it, filter it, and use it in whichever way works the best. Like they say, the things PowerShell can do are only restricted by the proficiency of the user.
