Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We’ve all been in the situation where suddenly you are the lone developer on call while everyone is out of pocket. Or in the case of Grafana Labs Director of UX David Kaltschmidt, his then business partner, Grafana Labs VP of Product Tom Wilkie, was checking out for a weekend music fest. “Tom and I founded a company a couple of years ago, and I’m more of a frontend person. Tom did all the backend and devops stuff,” explained Kaltschimdt.

It’s finally time for a new Grafana release again. Grafana 6.2 includes improved security, enhanced provisioning workflow, a new Bar Gauge panel, Elasticsearch 7 support, and lazy loading of panels, among other things.

Grafana Labs has been running Cortex for more than a year to power Hosted Prometheus in Grafana Cloud. We’re super happy: It’s been incredibly stable and has recently gotten insanely fast. Here’s what you need to know about Cortex, what we’ve been doing to Cortex in the past year, and what we plan on doing in the coming months.

Can you monitor us now? That was the question Verizon started asking as the Fortune 500 company expanded its portfolio beyond communications services to include brands such as Yahoo! and Huffpost. “We’re not just grandma’s landline,” Sean Thomas, Verizon Systems Engineering Manager, told the audience at GrafanaCon in L.A. “We’re not just your mobile provider. We are a media company. We have 5G solutions. We’re building technology.

There are countless Grafana dashboards that will only ever be seen internally. But there are also a number of large organizations that have made their dashboards public for a variety of uses. These dashboards can be interesting to browse, giving you an insider’s peek into how real Grafana users set up their visualizations, with actual live data to boot. Perhaps some of them will inspire you to get to work on your own Grafana?

“To start, your monitoring stack should not cost you stacks,” Sensu Software Engineer Nikki Attea told the crowd at GrafanaCon L.A. “Avocado toast is really expensive. But the good news is your monitoring solution doesn’t have to be.” To prove it, Attea presented an easy developer-centric use case that leverages Sensu, a monitoring event pipeline which collects, processes, and roots different event types including discovery, availability, telemetry, and alerts.

The Emergency Services team at Trapeze Group provides 24/7/365 support for ambulances in Australia. Each fleet can contain as many as 1,000 vehicles, with more than 60 telemetry channels and 120 million messages going in and out to paramedics every day.

While Logz.io provides Kibana — the ELK Stack’s visualization tool — as part of its service, a lot of users have asked us to support Grafana. One of the leading open source visualization tools today, Grafana has some added value when compared to Kibana, especially around visualizing time-series data.

A very useful feature of Grafana is the ability to display dashboards and playlists on a large TV. Documentation on how to do this is sparse, which inspired this tutorial and also led to automating the process.

The Internet of Things has transformed people’s lives, enabling everything from “smart homes” to remote health monitoring. And now a startup called AMMP Technologies is using IoT – and Grafana – to help bring electricity to rural Africa. Hendrik Broering, COO and cofounder of AMMP, told the audience at GrafanaCon L.A. about a village in Tanzania called Changombe, with a population of about 2,000 and no access to electricity until 2017.