Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In 2020, we launched the Google Sheets data source for Grafana, providing organizations with real-time data visualization capabilities for all their go-to spreadsheets. Since then, thousands of users have installed the data source to quickly and easily derive insights from their spreadsheet data. In this blog post, we’ll explore key features of the Google Sheets data source, as well as some helpful resources to install and start using the data source today.

If you're a Microsoft shop, it is a given that you have loads of SQL databases lying around with critical data in them. SquaredUp lets you connect to your SQL database and run SQL queries on the database to fetch data and build dashboards with it. Let's see how.

Shopify is a fantastic tool for organizations who want to sell products, but don’t want to build or maintain an e-commerce platform themselves. Even some of the largest brands that have built their own e-commerce platforms in the past have seen the value of using Shopify to accelerate their business. As your Shopify site scales and grows, however, you may need more insight into the performance of your store.

Andrew Dedesko is a backend software engineer with 13 years of experience. He became very interested in metrics and alerting after being woken up countless nights while on call. Outside of work, Andrew likes cycling, camping, making s’mores, and pancakes. Adriano Mariani is a software engineer with three years of experience specializing in backend software development. Currently, Adriano is working at Kijiji on SEO-related initiatives.

If you are part of an engineering team, monitoring the performance of your CI/CD pipelines is a high priority. With the SquaredUp GitHub plugin you can view key metrics for your GitHub repos and workflows all within a single pane of glass. We also have plugins for Jira, Circle CI, Azure DevOps and more. So even if you are using many different tools you can still get an end to end view of your processes.

Synthetic monitoring is a critical practice to proactively track the health and performance of web applications. By simulating user interactions, this approach helps developers identify issues before they impact real users. One of the simplest forms of synthetic monitoring is known as a ping check, which verifies whether an endpoint is reachable. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at what a ping check is, and then walk through how to perform one using Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring.

As an Azure admin, it is of critical importance that you keep an eye on how much cost you are incurring running your workloads in the cloud. You also want to have sight of any deployed resources that are not contributing to business and accumulating cost over time. Using a dedicated Azure plugin, SquaredUp dashboards will help you understand your Azure costs across services, resources, locations and apps – so you can keep tabs on how much you're spending and identify opportunities to save costs.

So you had a great day playing with really awesome new tech, solving big business challenges, and feeling like you really nailed it. Then you wake up the next day to an alert from Azure telling you you've blown your monthly budget and its only the first week of the month. We've all been there... right? Using any cloud service comes with a cost, but for most services the budget risk is low. Cost calculated daily isn't a problem when usage is predictable, but not everything works like that.