Grafana v5.4 brings new features, many enhancements and bug fixes. This article will detail the major new features and enhancements.

Lots to catchup on this week after taking a break for Thanksgiving, so let’s dive in! This week we share the video from the ‘Logging is coming to Grafana’ talk, an article on how Stack Overflow tackles monitoring, a shout out from AWS re:Invent 2018, and a plugin preview for Timestream, Amazon’s new TSDB for IoT apps.

Quality assurance is a priority at Evolution Gaming, the world leader in live casino gaming, and as Andrejs Kalnacs, Lead Software Developer in Test, said during his GrafanaCon EU talk in March, Grafana has been a game changer. While Kalnacs and his team have found Grafana to be invaluable in many areas, here are three best practices they’ve learned throughout their journey.

Let’s face it, Kibana and Grafana were naturally meant to go together, right? They’re both great individually, but sparks really start to fly when they work together! Each has their own strengths but combined they cover all the monitoring and troubleshooting use cases you need. So what is keeping these two highly compatible technologies apart? Nothing. Anymore.

This week we released Grafana v5.3.4 which includes an important security fix, so we recommend you update your instance today. Also in this issue of TimeShift we share the first group of confirmed GrafanaCon LA speakers, and tell you about 5 plugins that have been recently updated.

Today we are releasing Grafana 5.3.3 and 4.6.5. These patch releases include an important security fix for all Grafana installations between 4.1.0 and 5.3.2. We also release 5.3.4 at the same time containing some fixes and improvements that we have been holding off for a while to release 5.3.3.

The team was busy speaking at events in Europe and the US this week, showing off new Grafana features and talking about what’s to come. Check out the presentation on logging in Grafana below; we’ll share the video once it’s available. Also in this week’s issue we have 2 new plugins to share, and your weekly dose of Grafana related blog articles and videos.

This week we highlight Grafana project contributors from Hacktoberfest, share an article we published earlier this week on monitoring devices in your home with Prometheus and Grafana, how SoftwareMill manages their dashboards across environments and more.

All Things Open, a conference focused on open source technologies, was held in Raleigh, NC this week and was bursting at the seams with over 4,500 attendees. Grafana Labs’ own Tom Wilkie gave his RED Method: How to instrument your services talk to a standing-room only crowd. We were excited to speak at and sponsor ATO and look forward to next year.

This is the second part of a series on the CloudReady dashboards and visualizations. The first part covered basics like Overviews, Refresh, and Layout settings. In this second part, we’ll cover more advanced creation and usage of dashboards. In part 3 and 4 we’ll cover actual widgets and how they can be used.