The audience was buzzing when Ryan McKinley, VP of Innovation at Grafana Labs, demoed the new native support for InfluxDB Flux queries in his talk at the InfluxDays virtual conference in late June. Whether the goal is to build IoT applications, or monitor DevOps infrastructure or another application or system, it’s important to move beyond just visualizing the data.

In helping users unify and contextualize all their observability data, Grafana is completely database-agnostic. “We believe that organizations get the best view of what’s going on when they pull in their data from wherever it lives,” said Raj Dutt, CEO of Grafana Labs, the company behind Grafana.

In this post we’ll show how you can easily ship your existing Graphite metrics to Grafana’s managed metric offering using carbon-relay-ng. Carbon-relay-ng is a fast, go-based carbon-relay replacement that allows you to easily aggregate, filter and route your Graphite metrics. This post assumes you have a local carbon-relay-ng binary. You can download carbon-relay-ng binaries from the releases page and find documentation on Docker images, Linux packages, and how to build it yourself here.

Jaeger primarily supports two backends: Cassandra and Elasticsearch. Here at Grafana Labs we use Scylla, an open source Cassandra-compatible backend. In this post we’ll look at how we run Scylla at scale and share some techniques to reduce load while ingesting even more spans. We’ll also share some internal metrics about Jaeger load and Scylla backend performance. Special thanks to the Scylla team for spending some time with us to talk about performance and configuration!