Welcome to the next chapter of Grafana Loki! After five years of dedicated development, countless hours of refining, and the support of an incredible community, we are thrilled to announce that Grafana Loki 3.0 is now generally available. The journey from 2.0 to 3.0 saw a lot of impressive changes to Loki. Loki is now more performant, and it’s capable of handling larger scales — all while remaining true to its roots of efficiency and simplicity.

On October 1, 2022, the UK Telecommunications Security Act (TSA) went into effect, imposing new security requirements for public telecom companies. The purpose of the act is noble, as it wants to ensure the reliability and resilience of the UK telecommunications network that underpins virtually every aspect of the economy and modern society.

Site reliability engineers (SREs) and security analysts — despite having very different roles — share a lot of the same goals. They both employ proactive monitoring and incident response strategies to identify and address potential issues before they become service impacting. They also both prioritize organizational stability and resilience, aiming to minimize downtime and disruptions.

Splunk’s extensible and scalable data platform has been instrumental in helping ITOps teams fully understand their tech environments and tackle any IT use case with data streaming, dashboarding, federated search, AI/ML, and more. But, with the explosion of telemetry and the growing complexity of digital systems, ITOps practitioners who rely solely on a logging solution are missing out on critical insights from their digital systems.

I recently attended SRECon in San Francisco on March 18 - 20, a show dedicated to a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale. While there were a lot of talks, I’ll focus on a few areas that gave me the most insight into how having the right data impacts an SREs and an organization’s success.

Stackify Retrace is an application performance management (APM) and log management platform designed to assist developers and DevOps teams in tracking, troubleshooting, and enhancing the performance of their applications and infrastructure. Stackify Retrace effectively combines APM with log management, enabling users to view detailed transaction traces for applications directly from the log statement to provide greater context and visibility for more effective analysis.

Cribl Search helps find and access data regardless of the format it’s in or where it lives. Search provides a federated solution that reaches into existing object stores and explores data without moving it or having to index it first. This same interface can also connect to APIs, databases, or existing tooling, and can even join results from all these disparate datasets and display them in comprehensive dashboards.

In software development, two primary models of software exist: open source and closed source. Both types have their benefits and drawbacks, and understanding the differences between them can help you make informed decisions when choosing software for your projects. To simplify the concepts of open source and closed source software, let’s use the analogy of community cookbooks — open source — and a secret family recipe: the closed source.

Recently, Elastic announced the AI Assistant for Observability is now generally available for all Elastic users. The AI Assistant enables a new tool for Elastic Observability providing large language model (LLM) connected chat and contextual insights to explain errors and suggest remediation.

In today’s data-driven landscape, every organization knows the immense value their data holds, but with the explosion of data from diverse sources, traditional data storage and management solutions are proving inadequate. Organizations are urgently seeking new ways to handle their data effectively.