Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

May 2020

GrafanaCONline Day 10 recap: what's new in Grafana Cloud Graphite and Metrictank

Welcome to the third and final week of GrafanaCONline! We hope you’re able to check out our last day of online sessions today. If you didn’t get a chance to watch yesterday’s sessions (or want to watch them again), here’s what you missed on day 10 of the conference.

GrafanaCONline: The People and Business of Grafana Labs and Closing

The GrafanaCONline schedule is here: https://grafana.com/about/events/grafanacon/2020/#schedule
Presenters will take and answer questions after the presentations in our #grafanaconline channel in our public slack: https://slack.grafana.com/
Can't hear us? Can't see us? Ask for help in #grafanaconline slack channel or DM us on any social network.

The UX changes we made for Grafana 7.0 -- and what you can learn from them

Behind every part of Grafana, there are the ideas, creativity and commitment of the people who made it. While that includes code, it is not limited to it. Since August 2019, Grafana Labs has had a dedicated UX team, and we have been involved in countless recent features and improvements. We want to show you how we do our work, why you users are at the heart of everything we do – and most importantly, how design changes can make software better.

GrafanaCONline: Reducing wine waste with Grafana and machine learning

Did you know that Grafana pairs well with a fine wine? That’s what machine learning company ML6 discovered when they worked with their client Accolade Wines, an award-winning Australian vintner whose goal was to decrease the waste produced in its global operations. ML6 used Grafana and machine learning to reduce wine waste and deliver a 200% ROI for Accolade Wines in the first six months, reducing the company’s financial loss by an estimated £75,000.

GrafanaCONline Day 9 recap: Prometheus rate queries explained, and inside one company's adoption of a central telemetry platform

We’re into the third and last week of GrafanaCONline! We hope you’re able to check out all of our great online sessions. If you didn’t get a chance to watch yesterday’s sessions (or want to see them again), here’s a recap of day 9 of the conference.

GrafanaCONline Day 8: Introducing the new plugins platform in Grafana v7.0

Welcome to the third and last week of GrafanaCONline! We hope you’re able to check out all of our great online sessions. If you didn’t get a chance to watch yesterday’s sessions (or want to see them again), here’s a roundup of day 8 of the conference.

GrafanaCONline: Prometheus rate queries in Grafana

Which range to use in a Prometheus rate query is already a bit of rocket science. When Grafana enters the game to visualize the result of such a query, things get even more interesting. In most cases, you’ll end up with a dynamic range, but navigating the many available settings for it is sometimes a bit daunting. But do not despair, this talk will teach you all you have to know, even in case when you add to the mix recording rules, which are blissfully ignorant of any dynamic range requested by Grafana.

GrafanaCONline: How to get an organization to adopt a central telemetry solution

One of the main objections to adopting a centralized telemetry offering that we hear is that “I need this obscure feature from insert your favorite vendor.” So, how did we drive broad adoption of a centralized telemetry solution built in-house using open source software? For a large organization, it’s not just a technical challenge, but also an organizational one. In this talk, I will present the approach we took to convince the 6,000+ engineers at Bloomberg to adopt a new and growing platform. I will discuss some of our key decisions and trade-offs, as well as share the lessons we learned during our four-year journey.

GrafanaCONline week three: Plugins, Chrome browsing data, Prometheus rate queries, and more

The third and last week of GrafanaCONline starts today! We hope you’re able to check out all of our great online sessions. If you’ve missed any sessions (or want to watch them again), the videos are available on demand here. Here’s what’s coming up today...

GrafanaCONline: Grafana plugins

With Grafana 7.0 we are graduating our packages for Plugin Developers to a beta stage. These packages (@grafana/ui, @grafana/data, @grafana/runtime and last but not least @grafana/toolkit) are aimed to simplify the developer experience for those who wish to extend the Grafana platform. In this webinar I’ll present key ideas behind these packages and the way how you can use them to build for the Grafana Platform and create consistent experiences for the audience of your plugins.

GrafanaCONline: Chrome browsing data to Grafana - as you browse

Chrome Devtools is used by all web developers to debug and inspect network traffic. Sometimes the page loads sluggishly, and then you open Devtools and reload the page, and the problem is gone. What if you wanted to know how well the site performs, for example, when you click six pages? While it is possible to keep the tab open at all times, it is hard to see the big picture from the data in the network tab. This is a wonderful use case for time series and Grafana! In this presentation I will show how to get the same data visualized in Grafana in near real time (1s delay) without opening the Devtools at all.

GrafanaCONline Day 7 recap: The past, present and future of Loki, and making dashboards that tell stories

GrafanaCONline is live! We hope you’re able to check out all of our great online sessions. If you aren’t up-to-date on the presentations, here’s what you missed on day 7 of the conference.

New in Grafana 7.0: Trace viewer and integrations with Jaeger and Zipkin

Moving to a scalable, distributed microservice architecture poses a great deal of challenges for any organization. It gets harder to understand the system and pinpoint where errors originate. Logs get much messier, and stitching together a coherent picture of a particular request can be time-consuming or downright impossible. Distributed tracing can help with all of that.

GrafanaCONline Day 6 recap: The power of Tanka, and a peek into the world of beehive monitoring with Grafana dashboards

GrafanaCONline is live! We hope you’re able to catch the great online sessions we have planned. If you aren’t up-to-date on the presentations, here’s what you missed on day 6 of the conference.

Cortex v1.1 released with improved reliability and performance

Today we’re releasing Cortex 1.1, the first (minor) release since Cortex went GA in March, over 6 weeks ago. This release represents more than 140 commits by over 30 different authors from 9 different companies. In this post we’re going to give you some of the highlights of this release.

GrafanaCONline: Chrome browsing data to Grafana - as you browse

This session covers using variables to combine weather records and forecasts to measure a beehive – and how this can help beekeepers. We’ll also show how to compare particulate-matter (PM) measurements of nearby stations from different networks and develop a humidity-correction for low-cost PM sensors within a Grafana dashboard.

GrafanaCONline: Loki future

It has been two years since Tom Wilkie and David Kaltschmidt created the design doc that kickstarted the Loki project. In this presentation we will go back in time and talk about the original design for Loki and then compare/contrast that with where the project is today. We will then spend some time talking about the future plans for Loki, what some long term goals and non-goals are, what features we would like to add, and highlight the active discussion and plans for the LogQL query language. Finally, we will close by talking about the difficult and often controversial topic of monetizing open source projects – confirming our commitment to Loki open source while explaining our Hosted Loki and Loki Enterprise.

GrafanaCONline: What's the bee-weather & how to correct particulate-matter readings

This session covers using variables to combine weather records and forecasts to measure a beehive – and how this can help beekeepers. We’ll also show how to compare particulate-matter (PM) measurements of nearby stations from different networks and develop a humidity-correction for low-cost PM sensors within a Grafana dashboard.

GrafanaCONline: Tanka: Declarative Dashboards for Declarative Clusters

Tanka is a powerful tool for managing Kubernetes resources using the Jsonnet language. Along with a demonstration of deploying Grafana to Kubernetes using Tanka, this session will cover the benefits of deploying your dashboards alongside your code, how to manage Kubernetes resources using Tanka and Jsonnet, and how to create dashboards using Grafonnet and deploy them with Tanka.

GrafanaCONline Days 3 & 4 recap: All about Grafana v7.0, the future of Prometheus, and the observability tools every company needs

GrafanaCONline is live! We hope you’re able to catch the great online sessions we have planned over the next couple of weeks. If you haven’t had a chance to tune in lately, here’s what you missed on days 3 and 4 of the conference.

GrafanaCONline: Nissan Leaf -> cloud all the things

Come join me on an adventure to analyze and improve my driving behavior and driving routes to get the most range out of my all-electric Nissan Leaf. You will get to see how you can use Grafana, Cortex, Loki, and other amazing open source technologies on a $35 Raspberry Pi to process and store over 1000 messages/second from the vehicle CAN bus along with GPS data and even camera images!

GrafanaCONline: Slicing Kubernetes: Raspberry Pis, monitoring and chaos

Do you ever feel like your systems lack unnecessary complexity and overengineering? This is the talk for you. Join me as I detail the creation of a Raspberry Pi-based desktop Kubernetes cluster in an attempt to overcomplicate the already complex world of stateless web application deployment. We’ll walk through building an observability platform using open source tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger to keep a close watch on our tiny fragile microservices and then break them intentionally for our own amusement.

GrafanaCONline: Industrial process monitoring: oil and gas industry

We have been utilizing Grafana at Whiting Oil and Gas for approximately three years. In that time, we have greatly impacted the way our field assets are managed through dashboards and alerting. Instead of servers and network data, Whiting is using the application to monitor oil and gas wells in remote locations. Historically, the energy industry has deployed very expensive tools to monitor assets and visualize data.

Grafana v7.0 released: New plugin architecture, visualizations, transformations, native trace support, and more

We are thrilled to announce that Grafana 7.0 has been released for general availability. Join us as Torkel Ödegaard, the creator of Grafana, hosts a full demo of 7.0 during GrafanaCONline today. With Grafana v7.0, our goal was to extend on the Grafana platform by making it easier and more consistent for existing users, and intuitive and simple for those not familiar with Grafana.

GrafanaCONline Day 2 recap: The future of worldPing and an industrial IoT use case of Grafana

GrafanaCONline is live! We hope you’re able to catch the great online sessions we have planned over the next couple of weeks. After Grafana creator Torkel Ödegaard, Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt, and VP of Product (and Cortex co-creator) Tom Wilkie kicked off the conference with a keynote discussing the future of Grafana and the upcoming Grafana 7.0 release, GrafanaCONline continued with a focus on Grafana’s global reach.

GrafanaCONline: Prometheus: what the future holds

It’s been nearly 2.5 years since Prometheus 2.0 released and 2 years since Prometheus graduated in the CNCF. You might say that clearly proves that Prometheus has become mainstream. However, that doesn’t mean Prometheus would be “done” now. The developer community is more active than ever. Let’s have a look at the highlights of the past year and at the things on the roadmap. The speaker is one of the Prometheus developers and would also be delighted to hear from you what you want to see next in Prometheus.

GrafanaCONline: Strava: the Venn diagram of observability

In the era of services architecture, reliability engineering, and container orchestration, the word “observability” is widely used but rarely clearly defined. What is “observability” really? Of the various observability concepts and tools, what are the distinctions and overlaps in various technologies?

GrafanaCONline Day 1 recap: Opening keynote with Grafana Labs leadership

GrafanaCONline is live! We hope you’re able to catch the great sessions we have planned over the next couple of weeks. The conference kicked off yesterday with a keynote from Grafana creator Torkel Ödegaard, Grafana Labs CEO Raj Dutt, and VP of Product (and Cortex co-creator) Tom Wilkie.

GrafanaCONline: Fillet your herrings using Grafana

Datask, founded in 2019, has been using Grafana to monitor real time production results for one of the largest fishery companies in the Netherlands. This company has developed its own automatic Fillet machine, which is unique for the fishery industry. These machines will be exported to several countries in the world. We are using industrial IOT technology to monitor these machines and present performance figures to various stakeholders.

An (only slightly technical) introduction to Loki, the Prometheus-inspired open source logging system

Every application creates logs. Web servers, firewalls, services on your Kubernetes clusters, public cloud services, and more. For companies, being able to collect and analyze these logs is crucial. And the growing popularity of microservices, IoT, cybersecurity, and cloud has brought an explosion of new types of log data. That’s why log management is a huge $2-billion-plus market that’s growing 14% YoY.

Getting started with Grafana Loki on Google Kubernetes Engine - under 5 minutes.

Introducing Loki by Grafana, a new logging backend, optimized for users running Prometheus and Kubernetes. Loki is a great match with Grafana for searching, visualizing and exploring your logs natively. Loki is the latest 100% open source project from the team at Grafana Labs.

Grafana 7.0 sneak peek: Inspect drawer lets you get raw data and download as CSV

Grafana v7.0 is coming soon! Here’s another sneak peek of one of its features: the inspect drawer. The inspect drawer is a feature that every panel will support, including internal as well as external community plugins. In this new drawer, you will be able to view the raw data in a table format, apply some predefined transformations, and download as CSV. “Download as CSV” previously only existed as a custom feature for the Graph & Table panel.

Grafana 7.0 preview: New image renderer plugin to replace PhantomJS

Many Grafana users export images of their dashboard panels. This feature powers the ability to receive alerts with a rendered image of the panel attached, which is valuable for quickly spotting if something is about to go sideways in production. Since Grafana v2.0, when support for server-side rendering of dashboard panels as images was introduced, PhantomJS has served as the built-in image renderer that enables this feature.

How isolation improves queries in Prometheus 2.17

There are instances in life when isolation is actually welcome. One of those instances pertains to the I in the acronym ACID, which outlines the key properties necessary to maintain the integrity of transactions in a database. The time series database (TSDB) embedded in the Prometheus server has the C (consistency), the D (durability), and – somewhat debatable – the A (atomicity). But up until and including Prometheus v2.16, it did not have the I (isolation).

Improving Graphite rollup and runtime consolidation in Metrictank and Grafana 7.0 with lineage metadata

The Grafana and Metrictank/Graphite teams have been hard at work to deliver an exciting new feature for the upcoming Grafana v7.0 release: a rollup indicator and series lineage metadata breakdown for Metrictank. This blog will cover the new functionality around Metrictank metadata, the rollup indicator, and the lineage visualization coming in 7.0.