Grafana Tempo has had quite a year. Just eight months after it was announced at ObservabilityCON 2020, the open source tracing solution went GA. Since the Tempo team released v1.0 in June, we have ingested more than 39 trillion spans, a 26x increase from last year. We also introduced Grafana Enterprise Traces, which is powered by Tempo, to the Grafana Enterprise Stack.

This year, we were excited to deliver the easiest version of Grafana Loki to use yet. With Loki 2.4, the Loki team introduced a simple, scalable deployment, and over the past 12 months, we added lots of great new features. Not to mention, we launched Grafana Enterprise Logs, a new addition to the Grafana Enterprise Stack that’s powered by Loki. But none of this would have been possible without our active community: In 2021, Loki had 166 contributors and 823 PRs in GItHub.

Numbers don’t lie — and the data shows that in a year in which we, once again, endured unpredictable changes, Grafana experienced unparalleled success. In June, we introduced Grafana 8.0, which included unified alerting, new visualizations, real-time streaming, and more. Since then we have introduced a host of new features as well as new data source plugins that only reinforce Grafana’s commitment to our “big tent” philosophy.

Here’s a look back at the releases, products, community stories, and major announcements that defined another incredible year for Grafana Labs.

Ever known a project manager who thinks a task takes minutes when it really takes hours? One company has developed a helpful monitoring tool that not only helps project managers make more realistic estimates, but also helps product teams save time, increase efficiency, and improve their overall performance. At ObservabilityCON 2020, Walter Ritzel Paixão Côrtes, a product designer at Dell, gave a presentation about a data-driven solution his team developed called Product Team Observability.

On Dec. 8, we gathered the Grafana EMEA community for another dynamic meetup. Experts from the Grafana Labs and k6 teams alongside observability pros from different organizations covered topics ranging from shift left observability practices to monitoring your green thumb at home with Grafana. In case you missed the virtual get together, here’s a recap of each talk along with the session videos.

At re:Invent this year, AWS announced its new digital twin service, AWS IoT TwinMaker (in preview), which allows users to create digital twins of real-world systems like buildings, factories, industrial equipment, and production lines. Using a digital twin to monitor and improve operations for a physical system requires ingesting data from IoT sensors, process instruments, cameras, and enterprise systems, and curating and associating data from these disparate sources.

In collaboration with the AWS team, we have recently released the new Redshift data source plugin for Grafana. Amazon Redshift is the fastest and most widely used cloud data warehouse. It uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes by using AWS-designed hardware and machine learning.

On Nov. 8, I started as the new Chief Information and Security Officer at Grafana Labs. In my first five weeks, I’ve met about 100 really amazing people; learned and absorbed early lessons about our workplace culture; kicked off working groups for our 2022 initiatives (bug bounty FTW); and contributed to tackling our first-ever 0day. Amid all of that, I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking.

Monitoring is usually associated with servers and applications, but the fintech automation platform Ocrolus recently needed to set up monitoring for a different purpose: to gain meaningful data and insights about nearly 1,000 remote user workstations.

We’re thrilled to announce the addition of the Sentry data source plugin to Grafana. Grafana Labs worked in partnership with Sentry, the code observability platform, to help development teams see the issues that matter and solve them faster — across their entire tech stack — so they can remove silos and ship with confidence.

Amazon CloudWatch has recently launched Metrics Insights (Preview) — a fast, flexible, SQL-based query engine that enables you to identify trends and patterns across millions of operational metrics in real-time. With Metrics Insights, you can easily query and analyze your metrics to gain better visibility into the health and performance of your infrastructure and large scale applications.

In collaboration with the AWS team, we have recently released the new Athena data source plugin for Grafana. Athena is an interactive serverless service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena supports a wide variety of data formats including CSV, JSON, ORC, Arvo, and Parquet. Athena also integrates with AWS Glue Data Catalog, which allows you to create tables and query data based on a central metadata store of many AWS services, such as CloudFront, ELB, and more.

According to a 2020 CNCF survey, the use of containers in production has been rapidly increasing for the past several years. Nutanix, a global leader in cloud software and a pioneer in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, is part of that trend.

Development is no longer a linear journey from point A to point B. As more projects shift into a state of organic growth, user feedback and constant experimentation are increasingly becoming the norm, if not the standard for engineering. “In order to support this rapid experimentation, we’re beginning to embrace new working methods and practices,” said Vinodh Ravi, Executive Director of Platform Engineering at JPMorgan Chase.

A new version of Loki was released back in November, and I’m here to talk about one of its most exciting features. Loki 2.4 finally removed the requirement that all data must be ingested in timestamp-ascending order. Instead, Loki now allows out of order logs up to a configurable validity window (more to come on that). In this post, I’ll walk through what all this means and why we’re thrilled about it.

Back in May, we announced the Kubernetes integration to help users easily monitor and alert on core Kubernetes cluster metrics using the Grafana Agent, our lightweight observability data collector optimized for sending metric, log, and trace data to Grafana Cloud. The integration allows Grafana Cloud users to monitor and alert on Kubernetes cluster metrics. Since the original release, we’ve added new features and enhancements to help our users go even further.

Grafana 8.3 is here! This is an exciting release for Grafana Labs. This release includes the new Candlestick panel, a new visualization suggestions engine, support for AWS Metrics Insights and, for our Grafana Enterprise users, recorded queries. Get 8.3 You can get started with Grafana in minutes with Grafana Cloud. Here’s a closer look at the important new features in 8.3.