The term “off-label” is used to describe when a product is being used successfully for something other than its intended purpose. It’s a quite common occurrence in the pharmaceutical industry, but it can also happen in the world of software. Grafana Loki was written as — and is marketed as — a simple, Prometheus-friendly logging backend with a very low total cost of ownership.
In September 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Iron Bank formally authorized Grafana, Grafana Enterprise, and Grafana Loki, allowing the 100,000 employees and contractors who work on DoD software, both classified and unclassified, to easily select and immediately deploy Grafana Labs software without additional approvals and security certifications. In our first-ever government session at ObservabilityCon 2021, former U.S.
If you’re even the slightest bit familiar with how Grafana dashboards work, you’ve probably realized that the time range selector is one of the most important features. After all, when you’re using Grafana to visualize time series and logs, defining a time range is required for metrics and logs queries.
A huge challenge when dealing with incidents is the coordination and communication needed to put things right. What’s happened so far? Who has tried what query? Did we remember to keep stakeholders informed? What is the severity of the incident? Does this affect customers? Figuring this out requires a lot of back and forth as new team members join the incident.
Today we’re announcing the general availability of Grafana OnCall on Grafana Cloud for all paid and free plans. A big part of delivering great software is ensuring the right people get the right information when the inevitable incidents occur. We want to help you do that with Grafana OnCall, an easy-to-use, developer-first on-call management tool that’s built on top of the Grafana stack you know and love.
In your career, if your role has ever included the monitoring or managing of any network infrastructure devices such as switches, routers, firewalls, etc., you’ve very likely heard of SNMP. In case you haven’t, SNMP stands for Simple Network Management Protocol, and, unlike its name suggests, it is anything but simple. It is a standard protocol for collecting information from network devices and organizing it in a way that humans can (sort of) understand.
One of the powerful tools available in Grafana Cloud is Synthetic Monitoring, a black box monitoring solution that can provide insights that are hard to get in other ways. It provides a different view of your application by observing performance and uptime externally and from all over the world. As a result, you can build an understanding of what your end users are actually experiencing. However, as great as it is, synthetic monitoring does have limitations.
Once you have set up your Prometheus data sources in Grafana, it’s time to put them to work. In the one-minute tutorial video below, we show you how to build a query in Grafana 8.3 with Grafana’s easy-to-use Explore mode. Prometheus uses a query language called PromQL. If you are already familiar with PromQL, you can simply enter your query in the text field and run the query.
