Performance testing is an essential component of building fast and reliable web services. Until recently, this testing typically happened later in the development process and was often performed by a separate team or even a third party. But speed is the competitive advantage for companies, and prioritizing testing during the development process can speed time to market for new applications.
When you’re a sports betting technology company and you realize your in-house, on-prem Graphite solution for monitoring metrics is no longer a sure-thing, what do you do? That was the dilemma at Kambi, a quickly growing business – with a passion for using open source technology – that has about 500 different micro services in production and around 200,000 incoming metrics messages per second.
While there is a lot of focus on the three pillars of observability to provide insight into application performance in production, load testing is the other side of the observability story. By using the open source load testing tool k6 — which Grafana Labs acquired earlier this year — developers can simulate real-world traffic to test the reliability and performance of software changes and new features, not to mention flag performance issues before impacting end users.
As the number of connected gadgets in our homes, offices, and industrial networks continues to grow exponentially, keeping IoT devices secure has become a vital part of our everyday lives. However, our webcams, printers, and smart plugs often lack security features due to their fast time to market, making them particularly vulnerable to attack. And because security metrics themselves can be tricky to assess, tracking IoT device security is increasingly a challenge.
It’s one thing to set up an observability strategy. But what’s it like to introduce and scale observability effectively across an organization? In a wide-ranging conversation at ObservabilityCON 2021, three technical pros from Snyk, TripAdvisor, and Citibank joined Grafana Labs VP Global Solutions Engineering Steve Mayzak and — with more than 75 years experience between them — they shared the triumphs and turbulence in their respective observability journeys.
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. Since then, we’ve made some improvements to help our customers go even further.
With the recent release of Loki 2.4 and Grafana Enterprise Logs 1.2, we’re excited to introduce a new deployment architecture. Previously, if you wanted to scale a Loki installation, your options were: 1) run multiple instances of a single binary (not recommended!), or 2) run Loki as microservices. The first option was easy, but it led to brittle environments where a heavy query load could take down data ingestion and problems were often difficult to debug.
At Grafana Labs, we are continuing to build integrations that make it easier than ever to observe your systems, no matter which tools or software you choose. Today, we’re excited to talk about the latest integration available in Grafana Cloud: the AWS CloudWatch metrics integration, the first of our fully managed integrations that makes it simple to connect and visualize your data in Grafana.
On 2021-10-29, initial support for Prometheus Agent was merged, and it is slated for inclusion in Prometheus v2.32! This feature has a bit of a lengthy history to it: It took a little while to get to where we are today, but I’m thrilled that we were able to use the Grafana Agent code to enable agent-like functionality in the prometheus/prometheus repository.
Loki 2.4 is here! It comes with a very long list of cool new features, but there are a couple things I really want to focus on here. Be sure to check out the full release notes and of course the upgrade guide to get all the latest info about upgrading Loki. Also check out our ObservabilityCON 2021 session Why Loki is easier to use and operate than ever before.
Grafana Tempo 1.2 has been released! Among other things, we are proud to present both our first version to support search and the most performant version of Tempo ever released. There are also some minor breaking changes so make sure to check those out below. If you want ALL the details you can always check out the v1.2 changelog, but if that’s too much, this post will cover all the big ticket items.
This morning during the ObservabilityCON keynote, we announced some of the exciting projects and feature enhancements we’ve been working on for our customers and community. And it doesn’t end there. Throughout the week, we’ll continue to unveil new features, go deeper with live demos, and share our plans to shape the future of observability. With so many new announcements and features to check out, we want to make sure you know where to get more details about these developments.
Today, we are launching a new Grafana Labs product, Grafana Enterprise Traces. Powered by Grafana Tempo, our open source distributed tracing backend,.and built by the maintainers of the project, this offering is an exciting addition to our growing self-managed observability stack tailored for enterprises.
A critical part of managing modern software development is setting up and running an on-call rotation. But that often involves significant toil, in part because many of the existing tools are cumbersome and not developer-friendly. That’s why we’re excited to announce Grafana OnCall, an easy-to-use on-call management tool that will help reduce toil in on-call management through simpler workflows and interfaces tailored for devs.
As a composable solution, Grafana allows you to bring your data into dashboards natively without having to extract it, load it, or transform it. We believe in a “big tent” philosophy, which allows you to choose the tools that best suit your observability strategy, and with our plugins, Grafana is interoperable with more than 100 data sources.
Grafana Labs recently hosted its first company-wide hackathon, and we joined forces with Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein to bring sparse high-resolution histograms in Prometheus TSDB into a working prototype. The Prometheus TSDB has gained experimental support to store and retrieve these new sparse high-resolution histograms. At PromCon 2021, we presented our exciting, fresh-off-the-presses results from the ongoing project.
HashiCorp Vault is an increasingly popular multi-cloud security tool that allows users to authenticate and access different clouds, systems, and endpoints, and centrally store, access, and deploy secrets. At Grafana Labs, we’re always looking for ways to make it easy for our community to get started monitoring important parts of their systems. So we’re happy to share some new integrations that will help our users get the most out of Grafana + Vault.
I joined Grafana Labs as a software engineer in October to help build out a team focused on OpenTelemetry, and within a few weeks, I was promptly encouraged to run for a seat on the OpenTelemetry board. Every year, the OpenTelemetry community holds elections for a few seats on the Governance Committee board, which oversees the project at large. The results of this year’s elections are now available, and I am glad to share that I have been elected to serve on the board!
