Launched at KubeCon North America last December, Loki is a Prometheus-inspired service that optimizes storage, search, and aggregation while making logs easy to explore natively in Grafana. Loki is designed to work easily both as microservices and as monoliths, and correlates logs and metrics to save users money. Less than a year later, Loki has almost 6,500 stars on GitHub and is now quickly approaching GA.
Recently a question came up from a customer, and I was surprised we didn’t have an easy answer for it: How can you translate some esoteric ID or serial number, such as fe03-s3-x883, into a user-friendly name such as “harry” or “alice”? In a regular templating language, it would be easy to do via a map file or similar, but to do this with Grafana is a little more complicated.
One of the major projects we’re working on for Metrictank – our large scale Graphite solution – is the meta tags feature, which we started last year and are targeting to release in a few months. A lot of people don’t realize this, but Graphite has had tag support for more than a year. Our mission with Metrictank is to provide a more scalable version of Graphite, so introducing meta tags was a logical next step.
Since graduating within CNCF last August, Prometheus has adopted a new schedule for releases every six weeks. The latest release, v2.11, arrived on July 9. Prometheus 2.11 includes a new option to compress WAL records using Snappy, query performance improvements, the option to use Alertmanager API v2, and more. You can download the latest version here. prometheus_tsdb_wal_reader_corruption_errors is now renamed to prometheus_tsdb_wal_reader_corruption_errors_total.
The Grafana Labs community has more than 600 developers around the world who contribute to our open source projects. From time to time, they also ask really great questions about how to get started in Grafana, how to solve an issue, or how to implement best practices for various functions. Here are three of the most popular questions on the Grafana community board right now – and the answers from Grafana team members and fellow developers.
Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein, who recently joined Grafana Labs, is a longtime contributor to Prometheus. He recently gave talks at DevTalks Cluj and DevOpsCon Berlin about what’s been happening with the project since 2018, when it became the second project hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation to graduate.
Lazy loading of dashboard panels has been a popular feature request from the Grafana community for many years, and it was finally added in v6.2. In previous versions, the moment you opened a dashboard Grafana will issue queries for every panel, even those you have to scroll to see. This can create high peaks in load to your data source backends. Meanwhile, you may never actually scroll down to look at all of those panels, so executing queries for those panels would have been pointless.
A post-geographical culture means more than putting a face to the name. Here, the Grafana Labs team is also putting a photo to the workspace. Check out the setups that have been where some of the latest Grafana releases and products have been developed. What you’ll learn is that not only is the Grafana Labs team adept at creating dashboards, supporting hosted services, and hosting conferences.
We can sift through oceans of data. Alert on predetermined parameters. Deliver multiple commits a day. But as organizations leverage these layered, complex monitoring systems, “we also have to start practicing observability to enrich the actions that we take to solve problems as they occur and drive continual improvement,” said VictorOps Product Marketing Manager Melanie Postma. VictorOps is one tool that can help accomplish that.
