Grant Pinkos manages two businesses near Detroit, Michigan. He enjoys Industrial IoT, Industry 4.0, guitar solos, and Pomeranians, and holds a BS in engineering and an MBA. Grant is a Grafana Champion and is very active in community discussions. He has also presented at GrafanaCON and authored a tutorial.
Thanks for joining me for Part 3 of “The concise guide to Grafana Loki,” a series of blog posts that takes a closer look at best practices for various aspects of using the log aggregation system. Today’s post is my holiday present for all the folks out there running Loki who would like to get the most query performance they can out of their cluster.
Grafana Alerting helps you identify issues almost immediately after they occur — and you don’t have to constantly check your system to get the insights you need. Instead, Grafana Alerting sends alert notifications to reach you wherever you are, whether that’s in a Slack channel or in a messaging app like Telegram. Telegram is a viable option for receiving alerts, especially when you want personal or individual notifications rather than those sent to a team.
As the number of Grafana users grows each year, so does the variety of reasons people are using Grafana dashboards. During 2023, members of the our community — both inside and outside of the company — shared some of their incredible professional and personal projects, including how Grafana has allowed them to successfully launch a rocket, cut back on carbon emissions, and even help balance a national power grid.
Open source is the foundation of everything we do here at Grafana Labs, and that was on full display this year as we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Grafana and continued to improve and expand our lineup of OSS projects. But 2023 was also a banner year for Grafana Cloud, as more organizations than ever turned to the fully managed stack to carry out their observability strategies more easily and quickly.
At Grafana Labs, open source has always been part of our DNA. But in 2023 — a year in which we reflected on 10 years of Grafana, among other major OSS milestones — the power of our open source community felt especially palpable.
Welcome to Part 2 of the “Concise guide to Loki,” a multi-part series where I cover some of the most important topics around our favorite logging database: Grafana Loki. As I reflect on the fifth anniversary of Loki, it felt like a good opportunity to summarize some of the important parts of how it works, how it’s built, how to run it, etc. And as the name of the series suggests, I’m doing it as concisely as I can.
If you ask us to score 2023, we would give it a 10 out of 10. Not only because we released Grafana 10 and celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the Grafana project with the first-ever Golden Grot Awards and the launch of a four-part documentary series.
If you’ve landed on this blog, you’re likely either considering starting your OpenTelemetry journey or you are well on your way. As OpenTelemetry adoption has grown, not only within the observability community but also internally at Grafana Labs and among our users, we frequently get requests around how to best implement an OpenTelemetry strategy.
Incidents almost never happen in a vacuum. When you receive an alert about a potential issue, odds are pretty good that you’ll need to navigate between different tools and teams to get things resolved. Of course, timing is critical in these situations, so the easier it is to communicate — between both tools and teams — the better off you’ll be.
How do you know that your open source project has been enthusiastically adopted by the community? A) Engineers give you a raucous standing ovation when a feature is revealed. B) People form a long line to meet you at an industry event. C) Every time there is a release, social media notifications blow up your phone. If you’re Grafana founder Torkel Ödegaard, the answer is D) all of the above.
Five years ago today, Grafana Loki was introduced to the world on the KubeconNA 2018 stage when David Kaltschmidt, now a Senior Director of Engineering at Grafana Labs, clicked the button to make the Loki repo public live in front of the sold-out crowd. At the time, Loki was a prototype: We bolted together Grafana as a UI, Cortex internals, and Prometheus labels to find out if there was a need for a new open source tool to manage logs.
With the release of Grafana 10.2, we made a number of enhancements to Grafana Alerting. These updates included the rollout of Insights, a new section of the Grafana Alerting home page. Available now to all Grafana Cloud users, Insights offers valuable information, such as statistics on alert rules and notifications, to help you monitor alerting data and quickly analyze alert performance.
In observability, finding the root cause of a problem is sometimes likened to finding a needle in a haystack. Considering that the problem might be visible in only a tiny fraction of millions or billions of individual traces, the task of reviewing enough traces to find the right one is daunting and often ends in failure.
This blog post by Grafana Labs Senior Software Engineer Milan Plžík was originally published on the Kubernetes.io blog on Nov. 16, 2023. There’s been quite a lot of posts suggesting that not using Kubernetes resource limits might be a fairly useful thing (for example, For the Love of God, Stop Using CPU Limits on Kubernetes or Kubernetes: Make your services faster by removing CPU limits ).
On Dec. 5, 2013, Torkel Ödegaard made the first commit in GitHub for a personal project that would become Grafana. “It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years since Torkel launched Grafana, growing from a small man with a big dream to becoming the most popular data visualization software in the world,” says Grafana Labs co-founder and CEO Raj Dutt. “The Story of Grafana” chronicles that meteoric journey.
Windows is widely used by developers, businesses, and individuals alike. Renowned for its adaptability, security, and reliability, the operating system is a preferred choice for servers, desktops, and embedded devices. It also holds a significant presence in the cloud, serving as the foundation for numerous major websites and applications.
While we built Grafana Loki as an open source log aggregation system that is cost effective and easy to operate, let’s face it: sometimes there is no time or bandwidth to mess around with self-managing and self-hosting. Luckily there’s the fully managed Grafana Cloud observability stack for log management. “Grafana Cloud is a no-BS platform. The engineering costs of hosting it ourselves would be much higher," says Jameel Al-Aziz, a software architect at Paradigm.
Grafana Cloud constantly evolves to include new, cutting-edge features for end-to-end observability. In fact, just last month at ObservabilityCON 2023, we made a number of updates to our fully managed observability platform, including the general availability of Grafana Cloud Application Observability, Grafana SLO, and Adaptive Metrics.
