This morning, we announced that we raised $50 million in Series B funding. This additional funding, following our $24 million round last October, will enable us to dramatically accelerate research and development at Grafana Labs. We plan to hire more engineers and focus on product innovation. And importantly, it will help us continue to nurture and grow our community of millions of developers around the world.

Things have been busy with the Loki project! Once again, we waited too long between releases, and there are so many new things I won’t be able to list them all. But that won’t stop me from trying, so let’s get to it. For a change of pace, instead of listing interesting PRs, I’m going to talk through Loki’s components and mention the changes in more of a paragraph style. Let’s see how this goes.

In a recent blog post, I wrote about the work we’ve done over the past year on Cortex blocks storage. Cortex is a long-term distributed storage for Prometheus. It provides horizontal scalability, high availability, multi-tenancy and blazing fast query performances when querying high cardinality series or large time ranges.

The audience was buzzing when Ryan McKinley, VP of Innovation at Grafana Labs, demoed the new native support for InfluxDB Flux queries in his talk at the InfluxDays virtual conference in late June. Whether the goal is to build IoT applications, or monitor DevOps infrastructure or another application or system, it’s important to move beyond just visualizing the data.

In helping users unify and contextualize all their observability data, Grafana is completely database-agnostic. “We believe that organizations get the best view of what’s going on when they pull in their data from wherever it lives,” said Raj Dutt, CEO of Grafana Labs, the company behind Grafana.

Elastic Container Service (ECS) is the fully managed container orchestration service by Amazon. Combined with Fargate, Amazon’s serverless compute engine for containers, you can run your container workload without the need to provision your own compute resources. But how can you consolidate and query all of your logs and metadata for these workloads? Enter Loki, the log aggregation system from Grafana Labs that has proven to increase performance and decrease costs.

When it comes to systems reliability, you wouldn’t normally think that unleashing additional chaos would actually be helpful, would you? As more engineering teams moved toward microservice-based architectures for cloud applications over the course of this past decade, many of them didn’t change their testing strategies.

In this post we’ll show how you can easily ship your existing Graphite metrics to Grafana’s managed metric offering using carbon-relay-ng. Carbon-relay-ng is a fast, go-based carbon-relay replacement that allows you to easily aggregate, filter and route your Graphite metrics. This post assumes you have a local carbon-relay-ng binary. You can download carbon-relay-ng binaries from the releases page and find documentation on Docker images, Linux packages, and how to build it yourself here.

Jaeger primarily supports two backends: Cassandra and Elasticsearch. Here at Grafana Labs we use Scylla, an open source Cassandra-compatible backend. In this post we’ll look at how we run Scylla at scale and share some techniques to reduce load while ingesting even more spans. We’ll also share some internal metrics about Jaeger load and Scylla backend performance. Special thanks to the Scylla team for spending some time with us to talk about performance and configuration!

Cortex is a long-term distributed storage for Prometheus. It provides horizontal scalability, high availability, multi-tenancy and blazing fast query performances when querying high cardinality series or large time ranges. Today, there are massive Cortex clusters storing tens to hundreds of millions of active series with a 99.5 percentile query latency below 2.5s.