Here at Grafana Labs we are lucky to work with many partners around the globe. From these partnerships, we get great inspiration into some clever use cases on how Grafana and Prometheus can be used to great effect for service monitoring and availability. We came across this use case that our partner OpenAdvice came up with for their client base, and we thought it was too good to keep secret!

My name is Karine. I’m a Software Engineer working with a team that provides monitoring solutions to our clients. A good part of my daily work is creating dashboards in Grafana. Since I started working with this tool, I have been so impressed by the quality and ease of use. I became even more impressed when I discovered it was an open source tool.

Earlier this year, we introduced the Grafana Cloud Agent, a subset of Prometheus built for hosted metrics that runs lean on memory and uses the same service discovery, relabeling, WAL, and remote_write code found in Prometheus. Thanks to trimming down to the parts only needed for interaction with Cortex, tests of our first release have seen up to a 40% memory-usage reduction compared to an equivalent Prometheus process.

Back in March, we introduced the Grafana Cloud Agent, a subset of Prometheus built for hosted metrics. It uses a lot of the same battle-tested code as Prometheus and can save 40 percent on memory usage. Ever since the launch, we’ve been adding features to the Agent. Now, there’s a clustering mechanism, additional Prometheus exporters, and support for Loki. Our latest feature: Grafana Tempo! It’s an easy-to-operate, high-scale, and cost-effective distributed tracing system.

The observability market is undoubtedly hot. Consider the headline-grabbing evidence: multiple IPOs, hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funding for startups, and huge market caps of vendors playing in the space totalling more than $80 billion. Still, it has to be asked: Is all the hype warranted, or is this really just “absurdability”? We asked seven industry watchers to weigh in.

Grafana Tempo, the recently announced distributed tracing backend, relies on integrations with other data sources for trace discovery. Tempo’s job is to store massive numbers of traces, place them in object storage, and retrieve them by id. Logs and exemplars allow users to quickly and more powerfully jump directly to traces than ever before. Let’s dig into some examples with a live playground to try it out!

Hi folks, Ward Bekker here from the Solutions Engineering team. I’ve just published a video on the new Loki 2.0 release that I’m excited to share with you. The Loki team announced the brand-new Grafana Loki 2.0 release at last week’s ObservabilityCON conference. It’s an exciting, feature-packed release. Loki’s slogan — like Prometheus, but for logs — is more true than ever before.

MongoDB is one of the most popular NoSQL databases in the world, used by millions of developers to store application metrics from e-commerce transactions to hospital equipment inventory, from user logins to First World War diaries. MongoDB databases contain mountains of information that SREs, software engineers, and executives can visualize to run their businesses more effectively. Grafana dashboards are most effective when they are layered with context.