As we look to the future of Grafana Labs and our products, we are keen to expand the ways in which we can help engineering teams build, maintain, and operate great software. We believe we can only achieve this by paying careful attention to the developer experience and the challenges faced in the real world of engineering.

Pernod Ricard is the toast of the wine and spirits industry, with a comprehensive portfolio that includes brands such as Jameson, Absolut Vodka, and Havana Club. While the $53 billion company has thrived on traditional distribution channels such as restaurants, clubs, stores, and duty-free shops, Pernod Ricard has recently focused on growing its direct-to-consumer (D2C) e-commerce business.

We recently had a hackathon at Grafana Labs. Anyone who wanted could get several work days without normal responsibilities to do whatever they found meaningful in the wider Grafana community and/or Grafana Labs commercial offerings. This allowed me to invest some time into Kraken, a project designed for reading out different sensors, and to update it for modern hardware and libraries.

Grafana presents some of the most versatile tools for visualizing and understanding the real-time performance and reliability of systems, regardless of where your data lives. But one question our customers frequently ask is, “Can I use Grafana to understand the health and performance of my business?” More often than not, our answer is yes.

While unit testing and integration testing can give you insight into the individual functionalities of an application, “at times you need some sort of monitoring or testing mechanism which also simulates a user’s behavior to test how the application would work or look to an actual user in the world,” says Grofers Software Development Engineer Yashvardhan Kukreja. That’s where synthetic monitoring comes in.

We’ve seen the value that many in our community have gotten from using Jira for planning, tracking, and releasing software, so we’re excited to announce the new Jira integration for Grafana Cloud.

There’s stargazing, and then there’s SOFIA. The SOFIA airborne astronomical observatory is a joint NASA and German Aerospace Center endeavor consisting of a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft with a 2.7-meter reflecting telescope and a team of astronomers onboard.