Our hosted metrics offering, Grafana Cloud, is billed based on usage; a common question we get is “How much will it cost to monitor N servers?” We charge $49/month for every 3,000 active series or 18,000 data points per minute (dpm), whichever is higher. To help you understand what that translates to in terms of how much storage you need, here’s a rough guide to estimating the size of your system.

Recently, we ran into a problem where a customer’s dashboard broke to such an extent that it hung on loading. This is a really rare problem and in this case was an instance where the customer had created a variable that referenced itself. Once the dashboard is broken in this way, it is impossible to reach a screen allowing you to remove that variable. This post is not about how it was broken, but about how we resolved the error.

It all starts with Cortex – a horizontally scalable clustered version of Prometheus that was created three years ago and is now a CNCF Sandbox project. Cortex uses the PromQL engine and the same chunk format as Prometheus – literally the same code base.

There’s a huge need among our Metrictank and Grafana Cloud customers to be able to import their existing data from Graphite, so we recently refactored the importer tools to make the process easier. A few years ago, I wrote a utility to import Whisper data into Cassandra. At that time, Cassandra was the only store that Metrictank supported. But since then, we’ve added Bigtable, and we’ll likely add more stores.

When Patrick O’Brien interviewed to become a Site Reliability Engineer at The Trade Desk™, it was clear that taking the company’s monitoring system to the next level was the priority. “A chunk of my interview was about The Trade Desk’s previous monitoring system and how to scale it,” says O’Brien, who joined The Trade Desk more than two years ago. “I had a good feeling that would be an early task.”

The goal of Grafana has always been to help people feel in control of their observability infrastructure. Users come in with an alert; that takes them to a dashboard; they use ad hoc querying; and then they use log aggregation or distributed tracing to come up with a fix that will resolve an incident or issue.

At Grafana Labs, we are always working on optimizing query time on our Grafana Cloud hosted metrics platform, which incorporates our Metrictank Graphite-compatible metrics service, and Cortex, the open source project for multitenant, horizontally scalable Prometheus-as-a-Service.

With the recent release of Grafana 6.3 substantial refactoring and improvements to plugins, external auth systems, and permissions have been introduced in Grafana Enterprise. Let’s take a look at some of the latest Enterprise features here.

We are building Grafana Labs to be a sustainable open source company. In addition to maintaining the open source project and community around Grafana, we offer paid products that help make that possible. Grafana Enterprise was introduced over a year ago and adds features needed by enterprise-level organizations. In this blog post we’ll discuss some of those features and how we decide what goes into Grafana Enterprise.

Before Grafana, there was Kibana 3. Kibana was revolutionary when it came out, because it allowed you to use Elasticsearch in a very new way, for log analytics and not just normal document search, and to build dashboards without writing JSON documents. It had this nice UI, which let you drag panels around. But editing panels was a little tricky; you could only edit them in this sort of fullscreen modal. Still, it was really good for its time.