It’s finally time for a new Grafana release again. Grafana 6.2 includes improved security, enhanced provisioning workflow, a new Bar Gauge panel, Elasticsearch 7 support, and lazy loading of panels, among other things.

Grafana Labs has been running Cortex for more than a year to power Hosted Prometheus in Grafana Cloud. We’re super happy: It’s been incredibly stable and has recently gotten insanely fast. Here’s what you need to know about Cortex, what we’ve been doing to Cortex in the past year, and what we plan on doing in the coming months.

Can you monitor us now? That was the question Verizon started asking as the Fortune 500 company expanded its portfolio beyond communications services to include brands such as Yahoo! and Huffpost. “We’re not just grandma’s landline,” Sean Thomas, Verizon Systems Engineering Manager, told the audience at GrafanaCon in L.A. “We’re not just your mobile provider. We are a media company. We have 5G solutions. We’re building technology.

There are countless Grafana dashboards that will only ever be seen internally. But there are also a number of large organizations that have made their dashboards public for a variety of uses. These dashboards can be interesting to browse, giving you an insider’s peek into how real Grafana users set up their visualizations, with actual live data to boot. Perhaps some of them will inspire you to get to work on your own Grafana?

“To start, your monitoring stack should not cost you stacks,” Sensu Software Engineer Nikki Attea told the crowd at GrafanaCon L.A. “Avocado toast is really expensive. But the good news is your monitoring solution doesn’t have to be.” To prove it, Attea presented an easy developer-centric use case that leverages Sensu, a monitoring event pipeline which collects, processes, and roots different event types including discovery, availability, telemetry, and alerts.

The Emergency Services team at Trapeze Group provides 24/7/365 support for ambulances in Australia. Each fleet can contain as many as 1,000 vehicles, with more than 60 telemetry channels and 120 million messages going in and out to paramedics every day.

“I’ve run a lot of systems in production, and a lot of what has gone into the Kubernetes project came out of scars that came from running web search in production and running API services,” Brendan Burns, the co-creator of Kubernetes, said at the top of his keynote at GrafanaCon L.A.

At Grafana Labs, we field questions about best practices from customers all the time. One company recently asked whether it should run a containerized Prometheus environment rather than a VM-based one. We thought we’d share our answer here too. So: Should you run Prometheus in a container?

The situation is all too familiar: You get an alert. You look at your metrics and your dashboards to try and find out what the cause might be and when the incident actually started (instead of when the alert happened). Then you have to go somewhere else to look at logs because eventually you need more data.

A very useful feature of Grafana is the ability to display dashboards and playlists on a large TV. Documentation on how to do this is sparse, which inspired this tutorial and also led to automating the process.