Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At Grafana Labs, we believe in treating everyone with respect, and a core aspect of respect is clear and transparent communication. When we decided to move Grafana OnCall (OSS) into maintenance mode, we knew that along with the public announcement, there would be a lot of questions.

At Grafana Labs, we’re always searching for ways to develop products that give our users the best tooling to help in their day-to-day understanding of their systems. We built OnCall and Incident in Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, to make it easier to respond to and fix incidents — all on top of the Grafana dashboards you know and love.

When we launched Grafana Drilldown, our queryless experience for quicker, easier insights into your telemetry, we focused first on Prometheus because it was—and is—such a great solution for storing time series data. But as the industry continued to evolve, a different open source project began to emerge as another standard for modern observability: OpenTelemetry.

In 2020, we launched the Google Sheets data source for Grafana, providing organizations with real-time data visualization capabilities for all their go-to spreadsheets. Since then, thousands of users have installed the data source to quickly and easily derive insights from their spreadsheet data. In this blog post, we’ll explore key features of the Google Sheets data source, as well as some helpful resources to install and start using the data source today.

Shopify is a fantastic tool for organizations who want to sell products, but don’t want to build or maintain an e-commerce platform themselves. Even some of the largest brands that have built their own e-commerce platforms in the past have seen the value of using Shopify to accelerate their business. As your Shopify site scales and grows, however, you may need more insight into the performance of your store.

Andrew Dedesko is a backend software engineer with 13 years of experience. He became very interested in metrics and alerting after being woken up countless nights while on call. Outside of work, Andrew likes cycling, camping, making s’mores, and pancakes. Adriano Mariani is a software engineer with three years of experience specializing in backend software development. Currently, Adriano is working at Kijiji on SEO-related initiatives.

Synthetic monitoring is a critical practice to proactively track the health and performance of web applications. By simulating user interactions, this approach helps developers identify issues before they impact real users. One of the simplest forms of synthetic monitoring is known as a ping check, which verifies whether an endpoint is reachable. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at what a ping check is, and then walk through how to perform one using Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring.