Performance is one of those things that most people will agree is super important, but nevertheless tends to get overlooked. In light of that, I wanted to share the approach we recently took with auditing the Grafana product’s performance, and how we went about trying to improve it.

“Nines don’t matter when users aren’t happy” is something you may have heard a time or two from folks here at Honeycomb. We often emphasize the fact that while your system can look healthy at a high level, deep down something is likely broken in ways that cause pain for users. If you are empowered to ask detailed questions about your services, you can find and understand these problems more easily.

As your environment grows in scale and complexity, finding faster ways to build rich dashboards and share strategic insights with the right team members becomes more important. To help you easily share data with anyone, anywhere, we are happy to announce that you can now copy and paste widgets within Datadog (across dashboards, Notebooks, and accounts)—and even in emails and other communication channels like Slack.

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 questions that have gotten some of the most clicks on the Grafana community board – and the answers from Grafana Labs’ Director of Software Engineering, Daniel Lee.

It’s finally time for a new Grafana release again. Grafana 6.3 includes improvements to Explore, a new Time Picker, and a new Graph display option with gradients. There’s also new and improved Authentication options for Enterprise.

A couple months ago, we wrote about some Grafana dashboards that large organizations, for a variety of reasons, have made public with their actual live data. And we followed that up with a look inside the public dashboards at GitLab, a self-described “ridiculously transparent” company. It’s always interesting to see how Grafana users are setting up their visualizations, so we decided to do another roundup. Check these dashboards out, and get inspired.

Dashboards provide critical visibility into the performance and health of your environment. But if your organization uses hundreds or thousands of dashboards, or if you’ve recently transitioned to a new company or different team, it’s not always easy to understand the full significance of the data shown on every single dashboard.