In addition to our weekly roundup of Grafana-related articles and upcoming events, we’re pleased to announce Grafana v5.1.3 has been released!

Having worked closely with software developers for almost a decade, I’ve noticed some common traits amongst them. Technically minded people think about problems in different ways. I’m often stunned how I could miss such an obvious data point or edge case when discussing product changes with people who have a far greater technical mind than myself.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved building businesses. Ideas have always come naturally to me, and over the years I have honed my skills at actually making those ideas a reality. I recall one of my first businesses at about 12 or 13 years old, designing nicer looking versions of property data sheets for real estate agents to give out to prospective buyers. My most recent profitable business is StatusGator, a status page monitoring and alerting service.

Before the philosophy of DevOps, developers would build products, services, and infrastructures , but the responsibility for maintaining them would shift to operators, aka system or IT admins. The DevOps philosophy removes the boundary between Operations and Development teams, making system reliability a shared responsibility of all parties.

Logs contain some of the most valuable data available to developers, DevOps practitioners, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and security teams, particularly when troubleshooting an incident. It’s not always easy to extract and use, though. One common challenge is that many log entries are blobs of unstructured text, making it difficult to extract the relevant information when you need it.