A new year is a natural time to reflect on past achievements — and consider future aspirations. When I think about the observability space, specifically, in 2023, OpenTelemetry felt omnipresent. It was a hot topic at every industry event, with at least one dedicated talk at ObservabilityCON, Monitorama, PromCon, and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, both NA and EU. A notable highlight from KubeCon was OpenTelemetry going GA, marking a significant milestone in the project’s development.

In 2022, we introduced Grafana Mimir, the most scalable and performant open source time series database in the world. And since its launch, we’ve been busy, increasing Mimir’s scale, making it easier to get started, and boosting query performance. But even with these advancements, we understand the challenges that can come with a self-hosted and self-managed OSS tool.

While many segments of the IT market move quickly, the observability space seems to move at lightning speed. Fueled by open source innovation, observability toolsets and best practices constantly evolve. Sometimes, it can be tough to keep up — and even tougher to know where your own observability strategy stands. That’s the exact challenge we aim to address with our new Observability Journey Maturity Model.

Oren Lion, Director of Software Engineering, Productivity Engineering, and Tim Schruben, Vice President, Logistics Engineering, both work for TeleTracking, an integrated healthcare operations platform provider that is Expanding the Capacity to Care™ by helping health systems optimize access to care, streamline care delivery, and connect transitions of care.

If you’re using Grafana and Kubernetes, we’ve got exciting news — Grafana Labs will be maintaining and managing the Grafana Operator, the open source Kubernetes operator that helps you manage your Grafana instances within and outside of Kubernetes. This significant move not only elevates the Grafana Operator to an officially supported tool but also cements its place as a staple for managing Grafana as code, especially for users keen on adopting GitOps principles.

We’re excited to announce that with the release of Grafana Beyla 1.2, Kubernetes support is now fully integrated. With this update, the Grafana Beyla configuration now “understands” Kubernetes semantics to provide a more fine-grained selection of services to instrument. Beyla users can decorate metrics and traces with the metadata of Kubernetes entities, such as pods and deployments, that run the automatically instrumented services.

Grafana 10.3 is here! Download Grafana 10.3 The latest version of Grafana brings advanced controls for anonymous access in your Grafana instance and new options for multi-stack data source configuration in Grafana Cloud. The release also enhances Grafana visualizations, with additions like pan and zoom for the canvas panel and updated tooltips for better data interpretation. Plus improvements in Grafana Alerting and log analysis capabilities provide more efficient monitoring and troubleshooting tools.

With Grafana Tempo 2.3, we introduced a new storage format (vParquet3), which enabled an exciting new feature (dedicated attribute columns) that focused on the read path. Dedicated attribute columns offer a wide range of benefits primarily centered around query performance and memory usage. These columns can improve read speed across most queries, and they can have a major impact on resource utilization.

Jason Mallory is a senior MySQL/SQL server database administrator who develops monitoring and alerting solutions for operations departments in the aerospace industry. Jason is also a Grafana Champion. MySQL Network Database — or NDB, for short — is an in-memory, sharded database platform. Consisting of several moving parts, NDB can be one of the most challenging database platforms to monitor. However, monitoring NDB cluster health is crucial to ensure reliability and performance.

I’m happy to share some exciting news! Grafana Labs is taking ownership of the Zabbix plugin, one of the most popular third-party data sources for Grafana over the years. The Zabbix plugin for Grafana allows you to visualize data from the Zabbix monitoring system, offering a quick and powerful way to create dashboards. I personally started the project in 2015, with the goal of bringing a better dashboarding experience to Zabbix users.

When an incident occurs, every second counts. On-call staff need to quickly get all the relevant information in front of them in a way that’s easy to digest so they can more successfully investigate the issue and communicate with relevant stakeholders.

When an incident occurs, every second counts. On-call staff need to quickly get all the relevant information in front of them in a way that’s easy to digest so they can more successfully investigate the issue and communicate with relevant stakeholders.

I first learned about Home Assistant when my previous job’s manager shared that he charms his wife by using home automation to have Alexa announce the weather as she starts getting ready for the day. After that, he showed us the cool Grafana dashboards where he visualizes his entire home automation setup on a screen in his basement. As fate would have it, I got a chance to work for Grafana Labs soon after that, and I started building my own home automation setup using Grafana Cloud.

Amazon EC2 was one of the first services available on AWS, helping propel the cloud platform into the mainstream of IT. And while EC2 instances come in a wide range of sizes and flavors to address all sorts of use cases, keeping tabs on those instances isn’t always easy. That’s why we’re excited to introduce our new EC2 monitoring solution in Grafana Cloud.

From AI to OTel, 2023 was a transformative year for open source observability. While the advancements we made in open source observability will be a catalyst for our continued work in 2024, there is even more innovation on the horizon. We asked seven Grafanistas to share their predictions for which observability trends are on their “In” list for 2024. Here’s what they had to say.

On Dec. 18, 2023, we unintentionally introduced some new features and two minor breaking changes in the Grafana 10.2.3 patch release. These changes were originally intended for Grafana 10.3, which we plan to release later this month, but these commits were merged into the 10.2.3 release branch early due to a mistake in our release process. Because Grafana 10.2.3 introduces more changes than expected in a typical patch release, there’s a risk of more bugs than expected.

For this week’s installment of “The concise guide to Loki,” I’d like to focus on an interesting topic in Grafana Loki’s history: ingesting out-of-order logs. Those who’ve been with the project a while may remember a time when Loki would reject any logs that were older than a log line it had already received. It was certainly a nice simplification to Loki’s internals, but it was also a big inconvenience for a lot of real world use cases.

When monitoring sensor data, such as data from a weather station, a home security system, or a home automation assistant, it’s useful to have an alerting system in place, as well. By setting up alerts for sensor data, you can automatically receive notifications when any significant event occurs — whether that’s someone arriving at your front door or a thunderstorm rolling in.