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Grafana by default uses sqlite3 as a local database to hold the configuration information (such as users, dashboards, alerts, etc.). But did you know you can also use other databases for this purpose? Many large customers prefer to use either Postgresql or MySQL/MariaDB, and we recently had a request from a company wanting some help to migrate their configuration data from Postgresql to MySQL. This is not a common request, so we didn’t have any pre-existing tooling to do it.

YAML sucks! This blog post explains why existing tools hardly ease this pain, and what we at Grafana Labs did about it with our new project, Tanka.

There’s a famous Go proverb that states: Don’t communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating. At GopherCon UK 2019, Björn Rabenstein, an engineer at Grafana and a Prometheus developer, told the audience that when it comes to observations for Prometheus histograms, that saying doesn’t hold true.

During a lightning talk at PromCon EU last November, Grafana Labs developer Callum Styan, who contributes to Cortex and Prometheus, talked about improvements that have been made to Prometheus remote write – the result of about six months of work.

In this blog post, we will discuss the experiments we did to find the best hashing method for Metrictank data distribution.

We’ve had an eventful year here at Grafana Labs. As 2019 comes to a close, here’s a look back. Here’s to an equally exciting 2020!

As 2019 comes to a close, we’re looking back at the 10 most-read blog posts of the year. (We’re not including the also-popular release posts in this list.) Here’s another chance to check them out in case you missed them the first time around.

At KubeCon San Diego, I presented an updated and revised version of my talk “Blazin’ Fast PromQL”. In this blog post I’ll give you a brief write up of the talk and steps to reproduce the results yourself.

Great dashboards answer a limited set of related questions. If you try to answer too many questions in a single dashboard, it can become overly complex. As a consequence, a single dashboard often can’t tell the whole story. So you end up navigating between several, and it can be quite inefficient to search for a particular dashboard every time you need it. Luckily, there are some hacks for navigating between dashboards.