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.

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.

Grant Pinkos manages two businesses near Detroit, Michigan. He enjoys Industrial IoT, Industry 4.0, guitar solos, and Pomeranians, and holds a BS in engineering and an MBA. Grant is a Grafana Champion and is very active in community discussions. He has also presented at GrafanaCON and authored a tutorial.

Thanks for joining me for Part 3 of “The concise guide to Grafana Loki,” a series of blog posts that takes a closer look at best practices for various aspects of using the log aggregation system. Today’s post is my holiday present for all the folks out there running Loki who would like to get the most query performance they can out of their cluster.

Grafana Alerting helps you identify issues almost immediately after they occur — and you don’t have to constantly check your system to get the insights you need. Instead, Grafana Alerting sends alert notifications to reach you wherever you are, whether that’s in a Slack channel or in a messaging app like Telegram. Telegram is a viable option for receiving alerts, especially when you want personal or individual notifications rather than those sent to a team.

As the number of Grafana users grows each year, so does the variety of reasons people are using Grafana dashboards. During 2023, members of the our community — both inside and outside of the company — shared some of their incredible professional and personal projects, including how Grafana has allowed them to successfully launch a rocket, cut back on carbon emissions, and even help balance a national power grid.

Open source is the foundation of everything we do here at Grafana Labs, and that was on full display this year as we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Grafana and continued to improve and expand our lineup of OSS projects. But 2023 was also a banner year for Grafana Cloud, as more organizations than ever turned to the fully managed stack to carry out their observability strategies more easily and quickly.

At Grafana Labs, open source has always been part of our DNA. But in 2023 — a year in which we reflected on 10 years of Grafana, among other major OSS milestones — the power of our open source community felt especially palpable.

Welcome to Part 2 of the “Concise guide to Loki,” a multi-part series where I cover some of the most important topics around our favorite logging database: Grafana Loki. As I reflect on the fifth anniversary of Loki, it felt like a good opportunity to summarize some of the important parts of how it works, how it’s built, how to run it, etc. And as the name of the series suggests, I’m doing it as concisely as I can.