Last week on Slack: Eldin: Hey Christine, do you remember the first time you viewed a log file? Christine: Oh yes. I used Splunk as a support engineer and I remember. You? Eldin: I believe it was early 2000s. I was installing Slackware and a few network cards for a DIY router, and logs were critical. Hello again! We are Eldin and Christine from Solutions Engineering – a team at Grafana that is passionate about connecting people to our products – reporting back for duty.

I have been a Grafana power user since almost the day it was conceived. During this time, I’ve gotten acquainted with a few quirks but also many features, some of which are rather obscure. One of these features that few know about but I absolutely love is annotations.

Hashicorp’s Consul service is a distributed, highly available system that provides a service mesh solution, including service discovery, configuration, and segmentation functionality. Cortex uses Consul’s KV store to share information that’s necessary for distributing data to its components. While writing to Consul has been useful at Grafana Labs, we’ve found that as we expanded the operations, problems started arising.

As mentioned in a previous post, at Grafana Labs we make heavy use of Tanka and the Jsonnet programming language to manage our Kubernetes infrastructure. One of the benefits of the use of Jsonnet is the depth of collaboration that it allows with others outside of your company. For example, the open source prometheus-ksonnet library can be used to install both Prometheus and Grafana.

Recently, Loki v1.3.0 was released. It included many changes, but I’d like to talk about one in particular: the query frontend. This new component in the Loki architecture is a drop-in addition. What does that mean? Loki can run with or without it. In fact, the query frontend both produces and consumes the Loki API, meaning to a consumer there’s no difference.

PromQL is the querying language that is part of Prometheus. In addition to PromQL, Prometheus provides a scraper that fetches metrics from instances (any application providing metrics) and a time series database (TSDB), which stores these metrics over time. This introduction to PromQL will be largely decoupled from specific tools and the non-PromQL parts of Prometheus, in order to focus on the features of the language itself.

Greetings! This is Christine and Eldin reporting from Solutions Engineering, a team at Grafana Labs dedicated to helping users maximize what our Enterprise and Cloud products can do for your orgs. In a previous life, Eldin managed the customer experience department for several different companies and still remembers the pain of running daily reports so his team could have visibility into their ticket queues.

If you’ve heard about Grafana Enterprise (the commercial version of Grafana), you might be wondering if companies actually pay for something that is already so good as an open source software. In my role at Grafana Labs I’ve talked with hundreds of companies from all over the world, in many different industries. I’ve listened as they shared the daily challenges and frustrations they face at their organizations.

84.51°, the data analytics and marketing company owned by The Kroger Company, found out it needed centralized metrics the hard way. When Erin O’Brien was brought into the company in the spring of 2019 as a Lead Service Manager, she was tasked with evaluating and seeking ways to continuously improve how the Technology and Product teams worked together.

The Grafana 6.6 stable release includes improvements to Alerting, CloudWatch, Explore, Loki, Graphite, Stackdriver, and more.