Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Metrics for all – and all for metrics. At Grafana, we not only strive to give people a “single pane of glass” to unify observability metrics. From the very start, our mission has been to advocate for the democratization of metrics, which is the idea that the paradigm needs to shift between who can store data, why they need to store it, and, ultimately, what they’re able to with it. And Grafana users are a great example of how vast and varied the needs are for data access.

AMMP Technologies runs monitoring for energy systems, usually off mini-grids in Africa. The company uses Grafana to monitor interface with physical objects that are not servers or containers. “It’s interesting how a toolkit for visualizing essentially internet/computer/server metrics is so well-suited to working with real-life streaming data,” AMMP Cofounder Svet Bajlekov said during his talk at GrafanaCon L.A.

As a longtime systems engineer, Blerim Sheqa knows all about using tools like Grafana to debug issues in infrastructures. Currently the CPO of Icinga, an open source monitoring software, he gave a talk at GrafanaCon LA about how not to fail at visualization.

As a Sales Engineer, I hear interesting product requests on a daily basis, and integrating LogicMonitor reports with LogicMonitor dashboards comes up frequently. LogicMonitor's reporting engine has many useful functions from capacity planning to SLA calculation, and dashboards help users visually digest the raw data of reports.

As you may very well know, Kibana currently has almost 20 different visualization types to choose from. This gives you a wide array of options to slice and dice your logs and metrics, and yet there are some cases where you might want to go beyond what is provided in these different visualizations and develop your own kind of visualization.

Kibana is the visualization layer of the ELK Stack — the world’s most popular log analysis platform which is comprised of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. This tutorial will guide you through some of the basic steps for getting started with Kibana — installing Kibana, defining your first index pattern, and running searches. Examples are provided throughout, as well as tips and best practices.

The Monitorama Conference kicked off this week in Portland, Oregon, and Grafana Labs’ Tom Wilkie will be presenting his talk, “Grafana Loki: Like Prometheus, But for Logs,” tomorrow.

TimescaleDB is an open source database packaged as a Postgres extension that supports time series, but “it looks as if it were just Postgres,” said Timescale’s Head of Product, Diana Hsieh. “So you can actually use the entire ecosystem. You can use all of the functions that are enabled in Postgres – like JSON indexes, relational tables, post JSON – and they all work with Timescale.”

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in Barcelona, the Grafana Labs team delivered four well-received talks as well as a keynote in front of thousands of attendees. In case you missed the conference (or you want to watch the sessions again!), check out the links to our recap blog posts or watch the talks below.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona last week, Weaveworks’ Bryan Boreham and I did a deep-dive session on Cortex, an OSS Apache-licensed CNCF Sandbox project. A horizontally scalable, highly available, long term storage for Prometheus, Cortex powers Grafana Cloud’s hosted Prometheus. During our talk, we focused on the steps that we’ve taken to make Cortex’s query performance awesome.