Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

PromCon was held in Munich again this year, and this year was the best. I had a great time meeting lots of old friends and interacting with the amazing Prometheus community. I want to give a big shout out to Richi H for organizing the conference, and to everyone who attended for being an amazing audience! This year Grafana Labs carbon offset travel and food for the conference – but this post is not about that. Grafanistas gave 4 talks in the main track and another 6 lightning talks.

Building dashboards that show real-time streaming data and allow for interactive queries is challenging. At the recent InfluxDays conference in San Francisco, Ryan McKinley, Grafana Labs VP of Applications, discussed new approaches to integrate real-time data into Grafana dashboards. Prior to joining Grafana, McKinley worked at a renewable energy startup, Natel Energy, which builds hydropower turbines. There, he used Grafana and Influx to display an overview of how the systems were working.

Metrictank exposes many metrics to aid with operating the software in production. As the metrictank team (the primary on-call team for metrictank at Grafana Labs) grows and onboards new people, and more customers deploy the software on their premises, we need to solve a few problems regarding the metrics exposed by metrictank.

You might have seen a few of my tutorial videos on Grafana and Grafana Loki. If not, check them out here. These videos are a bit of an experiment to showcase the awesome work being done by the Grafana OSS community and for me to understand the technology better. I got a lot of encouraging feedback on the videos, so I plan to continue making them. A few folks also wanted to know why and how I created them. Happy to share the details here with you, and I look forward to your Grafana videos :)

Prometheus’s TSDB (TimeSeries DataBase) stores the recent data in the memory and the old data on persistent storage in the form of blocks. Each block has its own index to map the series to the actual chunks that contain the data samples. During Google Summer of Code 2019, I mentored Alec Wang throughout this work on lifting the size limitations of the index mentioned above. The work described below is up for review and should be merged soon.

We’re always looking for ways to improve the Grafana UX; recently, we’ve been working on redesigning form styles. The three key areas of improvement are accessibility, scannability, and appeal. They’re very much intertwined, and things like inconsistency affect all of them. Here’s a look at our design process so far.

We saw Cameron’s impressive dashboard in a Grafana Experts Facebook group and asked him to break it down for us. When friends and visitors see my personal home dashboard in my kitchen, they’re normally of the opinion that it’s “really neat” and looks “impressive.” Often that’s what they take away from it. It’s “cool”… and as much as that may be true, that is not its purpose.

More frequent releases! We continue to march Loki towards the first GA release, and to help that process we are going to target bi-weekly to weekly releases, depending on changes. - Ed Welch 08/12/2019 My mistake, there was clearly a typo in my previous post, and when I said bi-weekly I clearly meant bi-monthly. ;) The good news, however, is that the project has been very busy and there are some very exciting new features in Loki v0.4.0!