The Grafana Labs community has more than 600 developers around the world who contribute to our open source projects. From time to time, they also ask really great questions about how to get started in Grafana, how to solve an issue, or how to implement best practices for various functions. Here are three questions that have gotten some of the most clicks on the Grafana community board – and the answers from Grafana Labs’ Director of Software Engineering, Daniel Lee.

It’s finally time for a new Grafana release again. Grafana 6.3 includes improvements to Explore, a new Time Picker, and a new Graph display option with gradients. There’s also new and improved Authentication options for Enterprise.

A couple months ago, we wrote about some Grafana dashboards that large organizations, for a variety of reasons, have made public with their actual live data. And we followed that up with a look inside the public dashboards at GitLab, a self-described “ridiculously transparent” company. It’s always interesting to see how Grafana users are setting up their visualizations, so we decided to do another roundup. Check these dashboards out, and get inspired.

Dashboards provide critical visibility into the performance and health of your environment. But if your organization uses hundreds or thousands of dashboards, or if you’ve recently transitioned to a new company or different team, it’s not always easy to understand the full significance of the data shown on every single dashboard.

On Friday, July 19, Grafana Cloud experienced a ~30min outage in our Hosted Prometheus service. To our customers who were affected by the incident, I apologize. It’s our job to provide you with the monitoring tools you need, and when they are not available we make your life harder. We take this outage very seriously. This blog post explains what happened, how we responded to it, and what we’re doing to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Like Grafana Labs, my company, Load Impact, is built on open source. When we set out to build the k6 load testing tool, we knew we wanted to offer a purely open source stack. We’ve done performance testing for the better part of the past 15 years. When we looked at the market a couple of years ago, we saw a lot of both commercial and open source tools, and they were mostly either too simple or too complex. Additionally, there was nothing designed specifically for developers.

Launched at KubeCon North America last December, Loki is a Prometheus-inspired service that optimizes storage, search, and aggregation while making logs easy to explore natively in Grafana. Loki is designed to work easily both as microservices and as monoliths, and correlates logs and metrics to save users money. Less than a year later, Loki has almost 6,500 stars on GitHub and is now quickly approaching GA.