In a previous post we showed how to install Prometheus and Grafana using the prometheus-ksonnet library along with Tanka. This is great for getting a well-managed monitoring install going, but sometimes it isn’t enough for monitoring larger clusters. If you have multiple clusters that you want to monitor on a single dashboard, or need long-term storage, or need a high-availability setup for your monitoring data, then this installation won’t be sufficient on its own.

People think technical writing is boring, but sometimes documenting software is an adventure. It’s not an adventure like “whee, got my sword and shield, adventure time!” No, it’s more like taking a nice stroll down a path to an unfamiliar-but-known destination when the ground suddenly opens up under your feet. As you’re falling down into the depths, that’s when you realize you are about to have an adventure. I’m a technical writer at Grafana Labs.

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.

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.

Early last year, we launched the Integration Platform to enable any developer to easily create integrations and workflows on top of Sentry. As we continue to build out the platform, we want to give developers visibility into how their integrations are doing. With that, we present the Integration Dashboard!

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.