One of our favorite things at Grafana Labs is seeing Grafana dashboards in action. Over the past year, members of the Grafana community — from inside and outside of the company — shared the unique ways they have used dashboards to monitor a wide range of projects including an elderly parent’s home, a Tesla, and a python named Pretzel. Let’s take a look back at some of the eye-catching and informative results.
With every new update and feature we introduced to our open source LGTM stack this year, we have also enhanced Grafana Cloud, our hosted offering that is powered by Grafana Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Grafana Tempo for traces, and Grafana Mimir for metrics. With Grafana Cloud, “we have curated the open source experience into an easy-to-use, opinionated, and integrated platform,” Grafana Labs VP of Technology Tom Wilkie said in the ObservabilityCON 2022 keynote.
At Grafana Labs, we’re all about open source, and this year we took it to a whole new level. Many of you are familiar with the acronym “LGTM,” which is shorthand for “Looks good to me” and commonly used in code reviews. At Grafana Labs, LGTM has also been a guiding rubric in developing our observability stack.
There are more than a million reasons (and Grafana instances!) that have made 2022 a standout year at Grafana Labs. But here are the top 10 releases, products, company milestones, and major announcements that were off the charts.
Outlier Detection is now available as part of the Grafana Machine Learning toolkit in Grafana Cloud for Pro and Advanced users. With this feature, you can monitor a group of similar things, such as load-balanced pods in Kubernetes, and get alerted when some of them start behaving differently than their peers. There’s supposed to be a video here, but for some reason there isn’t. Either we entered the id wrong (oops!), or Vimeo is down.
The tire sales industry is a fractured collection of hundreds of point of sales systems and thousands of auto shops and retailers. As a result, manufacturers and distributors lack critical visibility into how these products are sold. SaaS startup Torqata aims to fix that.
Grafana Agent v0.30 is here! The past couple of Grafana Agent releases have been pretty exciting for us. We introduced Agent Flow as a new way to configure, run, and debug telemetry pipelines. We also announced OpenTelemetry Collector components to expand on our Big Tent philosophy and allow users to switch seamlessly between the Prometheus and OTel ecosystems. This latest release continues that momentum by introducing Loki components for building logging pipelines and marking Flow mode as beta!
The community has spoken, six Helm charts is not enough! We agree! In all seriousness though, six charts is simply too many to maintain. And while it might sound counterintuitive, that’s why we are announcing a new Helm chart. By focusing on the “Grafana Labs way" to run Grafana Loki using Helm, we believe this will help us and the community concentrate our Helm efforts into a single chart. This new chart is released under grafana/loki at Helm version 3 or higher.
Fact: The Security Operations team at Grafana Labs loves logs. They are a key pillar of observability for many reasons, such as how they are stuffed full of details to help us diagnose the “why?” when things go wrong. This is especially true when the information pertains not to a series of unfortunate events, but instead to an adversary trying to cause us harm.
In 2019, KCB Bank Uganda reviewed its systems and came to a startling realization: Due to outdated monitoring processes, its services could be down for hours before anyone was alerted internally. This downtime led to frustrated consumers, a rise in customer service complaints, and a decline in revenue.
Over the last few years, the Grafana open source project has grown at an eye-watering pace, with more than 1 million active Grafana instances now in the wild. With that growth, our processes have had to run to keep up. This is especially true when it comes to how frequently we release new versions of Grafana. Currently we cut.
Here at Grafana Labs, one of the things we’re always working on is making Grafana more consistent. Given the increased adoption of Grafana around the world and the number of users and authentication providers we support, we wanted to create better defaults for login and email fields.
For Formula 1, speed is about more than just how fast you go around the track. It’s also about having data at your fingertips in real time to make critical improvements before, during, and after the race. “Formula 1 is one of the most fascinating data-driven sports,” said Anshul Sharma, Senior Product Manager at Microsoft. “It’s so competitive that even one tenth-second advantage can change the outcome of the race.”
As part of our efforts to improve the security of Grafana, we introduced a long-awaited feature in the latest Grafana 9.3 release that enhances Grafana’s OAuth 2.0 compatibility. The new Grafana OAuth token improvements, which are available in Grafana OSS, Grafana Cloud, and Grafana Enterprise, ensure that the user is not only logged into Grafana, but they’re also authorized by the OAuth identity provider.
As Grafana has grown from a visualization platform to an observability solution, we’ve added many tools along the way. These tools are dedicated to help you throughout the software development life cycle, whether you are trying to prevent incidents, you are monitoring your application or infrastructure, or if you are in the middle of an incident.
We all know about the great things Grafana dashboards can do, and configuring them as code makes it possible to get even more out of them. These days, Grafana resources can mostly be managed as code in a declarative manner, which enables code review, code reuse, and in general, better workflows. This guide presents a few as code tools you can use to declaratively manage Grafana resources, plus some tips and tricks on how to incorporate them efficiently into your own use cases.
We recently announced a new open source project called Grafana Phlare. This highly available continuous profiling data source is built into Grafana core, allowing you to seamlessly monitor your profiling data. With continuous profiling, you can see which parts of your applications are consuming the most resources. You can then use that data to make any necessary tweaks to reduce consumption, which translates to lower costs.
Ricardo Liberato is a consultant building solutions for corporate clients using the power of the Grafana ecosystem to tackle problems beyond the data center and into the business realm. Since 2006, I’ve been consulting for a Fortune 100 life sciences company building increasingly powerful observability solutions. We started with custom-built solutions, migrating to Grafana and Prometheus back in the Grafana 3 days.
Grafana Loki 2.7 has arrived! With it comes an experimental feature we are rather excited about: a redesigned index based off of the Prometheus TSDB index. While we are still in the early stages, this enhancement in Grafana Loki, which we previewed at ObservabilityCON 2022, creates a smaller storage footprint, better query performance, and much more that we will dive into below!
