Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

June 2023

How Ultimate improved workflow, adoption, and more with Grafana IRM

“So you get paged and wake up in the middle of the night, you don’t know what’s going on, and there you are needing to figure things out — What kind of tabs do I need open? Where do I find the logs? Where are the dashboards and the metrics?” If you’ve ever been on call, this refrain, voiced by Alexander Rösel, Senior Software Engineer at Ultimate, will sound all too familiar.

Changes to Grafana plugins in Grafana 10 with David Harris (Grafana Office Hours #03)

Grafana 10 is fresh off the presses, and it includes some important changes to Grafana plugins that any plugin developer or user will want to know. Senior Product Manager David Harris chats to Senior Developer Advocate Nicole van der Hoeven about all the new features available to plugins (including the new Scenes framework) and some breaking changes to legacy plugins.

Build better PromQL queries with Grafana's metrics explorer

As more people and organizations adopt Prometheus and Grafana for observability, we at Grafana Labs want to make it easier for this expanding pool of users to answer questions about their systems, regardless of whether they’re experts or novices. That’s why we’re adding a feature to enhance metric browsing in the Prometheus query builder in addition to the metric select.

Watch Grafana 10 demos: New visualizations, plugin tools, and more from the latest Grafana release

With every major release of Grafana, we strive to give our users a broader, more powerful and more streamlined set of features for data visualization. Grafana 10, unveiled this month at GrafanaCON 2023, is certainly no exception. From more intuitive navigation to updated plugin development tools, Grafana 10 enhancements benefit new and seasoned users alike.

An inside look at how React powers Grafana's frontend

Grafana dashboards enable millions of users to visualize and analyze their data. And working behind the scenes of the widely used open source platform is React, a frontend JavaScript library for building user interfaces. In this post — which was inspired by my recent presentation at React Summit 2023 in Amsterdam — we’ll explore why we chose to use React for Grafana, and the benefits and challenges we’ve seen along the way.

Grafana k6 v0.45.0 release: gRPC streaming support, cloud script updates without running tests and more!

Grafana k6 v0.45.0 has been released, featuring a new experimental module for gRPC streaming support, a new browser recorder extension for Firefox and Chrome, and tons of improvements for Grafana k6 OSS and Grafana Cloud k6. Here’s a quick overview of the latest k6 release and all the news from the community.

The lowdown on Loki for log aggregation: 5 demos you don't want to miss

Looking to get started with log aggregation? Or perhaps take your logging game to a whole new, more advanced level? You’ve come to the right place. Grafana Loki is a key component of Grafana Labs’ open and composable Grafana LGTM stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics).

Rein in spending with Kubernetes cost monitoring in Grafana Cloud

As your Kubernetes infrastructure — and your business — grows, so too does the headache of managing your stack. And since controlling costs is crucial for your organization’s well-being, you need visibility into your complex system to ensure you’re spending your money wisely. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Kubernetes cost monitoring as a new feature in Grafana Cloud.

How to monitor an Apache CouchDB cluster with Grafana Cloud

We’re excited to introduce a dedicated Grafana Cloud integration for Apache CouchDB, a NoSQL document database that stores data in a JSON-based document format. Known for its scalability, availability, and easy replication of data across multiple servers, Apache CouchDB comes with a whole host of features designed to make it easy to run resilient distributed systems, with built-in bi-direcitonal replication allowing for simple replication across multiple servers and data centers.

New in Grafana 10: Securely monitor and query network-secured data sources from Grafana Cloud

Grafana is designed to visualize data in beautiful dashboards, no matter where the information lives. However, if you are considering the hosted Grafana Cloud observability stack for visualizing your data, you might run into a roadblock: network security. The problem is that some data sources, like MySQL databases or Elasticsearch clusters, are hosted within private networks.

GrafanaCON 2023 keynote: Grafana 10, cool new dashboards, and more

The keynote at GrafanaCON 2023 streamed live from Stockholm and kicked off two days of sessions on the latest Grafana 10 release as well as success stories and interesting use cases from the community. You can watch all the GrafanaCON sessions online. For more about Grafana 10, read the Grafana 10 release blog. You can explore all the new features in Grafana 10 by upgrading your instance or downloading Grafana 10 today.

How to observe your TensorFlow Serving instances with Grafana Cloud

The world of AI and machine learning has evolved at an accelerated pace these past few years, and the advent of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion has brought a lot of additional attention to the topic. Being aware of this, Grafana Labs prepared an integration for monitoring one of the most used machine learning model servers available: TensorFlow Serving. TensorFlow Serving is an open source, flexible serving system built to support the use of machine learning models at scale.

How many metrics? A guide to estimating the size of your system in Grafana Cloud

Grafana Cloud, our composable observability platform, is billed based on usage. A common question we get is: “How much will it cost to monitor N servers?” Well, the recently expanded Grafana Cloud Free tier includes up to 10,000 active series. To help you understand what that translates to in terms of time series requirements, here’s a rough guide to estimating what you’ll need.

Celebrating Grafana 10: Torkel's top 10 moments from a decade of dashboarding

Grafana creator Torkel Ödegaard will never forget the very first GrafanaCON in 2015, when he shared some big news with the audience gathered in New York City. “I’ll always remember standing on stage and announcing that we just reached 12,000 instances and being super proud because it was just a couple of months after we started tracking these numbers,” says Torkel, who also launched Grafana Labs with co-founders Raj Dutt and Anthony Woods in 2014.

GrafanaCON 2023 Day 2 Recap: A Grafana 10 deep-dive, Grafana Tempo and Mimir updates, home automation, and more

Today marked the second full day of GrafanaCON 2023, and all the excitement from yesterday certainly did not wane. Attendees and speakers alike continued to buzz about the Grafana 10 release — and so much more.

GrafanaCON 2023: A guide to all the big announcements from Grafana Labs

GrafanaCON 2023 marks a huge milestone: It’s the official release of Grafana 10 and also the kick-off to celebrating a decade of dashboarding with Grafana. The GrafanaCON 2023 opening keynote, delivered by Grafana Labs co-founders Raj Dutt, Torkel Ödegaard, and Anthony Wood, streamed live on June 13 from Stockholm, Sweden, the birthplace of Grafana.

GrafanaCON 2023 Day 1 Recap: Grafana 10 release, Grafana Loki updates, IoT monitoring, and more

From IoT monitoring to green IT, the first full day of GrafanaCON 2023 covered a lot of ground. It all kicked off with the keynote address, where Torkel Ödegaard, Grafana Labs CGO and co-founder — and the creator of Grafana — officially unveiled our latest major release, Grafana 10, alongside Director of Engineering Mihaela Maior.

What is Grafana Scenes? - with Torkel Ödegaard, creator of Grafana (Grafana Office Hours #02)

In GrafanaCON 2023, the latest version of Grafana 10 was announced, and with it, Scenes. But what is Grafana Scenes? Torkel Ödegaard, creator of Grafana and co-founder of Grafana Labs, joins Senior Developer Advocate Nicole van der Hoeven to discuss what Scenes is and how you can use it to create dynamic dashboards like never before.

Grafana 10 release: New panels, Grafana as code updates, data correlations, and more

We are beyond thrilled to announce the arrival of Grafana 10, which was highlighted during the GrafanaCON 2023 keynote. The latest major release of the popular visualization and monitoring tool, which now has more than 20 million users around the world, is not just about introducing new features. Grafana 10 is also about enabling you to achieve more — more analysis, more collaboration, more insights, more efficiency and, of course, more beautiful dashboards. Grafana: download now!

On-call management on the go: Introducing the Grafana OnCall mobile app

We’ve all been there: Sleeping peacefully in bed over the weekend, finally getting rest after a long week at your computer making AI-generated memes writing code. Then at 3 a.m., your phone makes an ungodly sound, and you wake up startled, frazzled, and confused. When you finally type in your passcode to unlock your phone (because facial recognition doesn’t register your bleary-eyed, squinty face), you see an alert, and all dreams of sleep are over.

Retain logs longer without breaking the bank: Introducing Grafana Cloud Logs Export

Late last year we announced an early access program for Grafana Cloud Logs Export, a feature that allows users to easily export logs from Grafana Cloud to their own cloud-based object storage for long-term archival purposes. We are pleased to announce that the feature is now in public preview for all Grafana Cloud users, including those on the Free tier!

Grafana Agent v0.34 release: Extended Kubernetes monitoring, support for HashiCorp Vault, and more

Grafana Agent v0.34 is now available! The v0.34 release includes features for remote secrets, better Kubernetes integration, and above all, more community involvement. The Grafana Agent team is also excited to continue driving growth around Grafana Agent Flow, a configuration mode that makes Grafana Agent easier and more powerful to run.

Easily monitor Docker Desktop containers with Grafana Cloud

18 million — that’s the number of developers around the world who use Docker, the popular tool for containerization. Docker Desktop, a software application for Mac, Windows, and Linux, is one of the most widely used tools within the Docker ecosystem, especially among developers who want to build, test, and deploy applications in containers on their local machines.

Continuous profiling now in public preview in Grafana Cloud

When we announced that Pyroscope was joining Grafana Labs back in March, we expressed our excitement that uniting the Pyroscope and Phlare open source projects and teams would accelerate our plan to add continuous profiling to Grafana Cloud. Just two and a half months later, that day has come! We are proud to announce that Grafana Cloud Profiles is now available in public preview for all Grafana Cloud users, both paid and free.

Introducing powerful APIs and webhooks for Grafana Incident

Grafana Incident, Grafana’s powerful incident response tool, comes with a range of integrations out of the box, including Zoom and Google Meet spaces, GitHub and JIRA issues, and even a Google Doc template for post-incident review documents. However, every team has unique needs and workflows, and you may need to integrate with other systems not currently on our roadmap or even use your own in-house tools.

Web performance testing: Compare Grafana k6 browser vs. Google Lighthouse

The Grafana k6 browser module simulates how users interact with a browser page and collects web performance metrics about the interaction. Since launching the module in 2021, we’re frequently asked how it compares to Google Lighthouse as a tool to measure web page performance. This blog post compares k6 browser and Google Lighthouse from various perspectives, including: Note: k6 browser is a part of Grafana k6 OSS.