At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in Barcelona, the Grafana Labs team delivered four well-received talks as well as a keynote in front of thousands of attendees. In case you missed the conference (or you want to watch the sessions again!), check out the links to our recap blog posts or watch the talks below.
At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona last week, Weaveworks’ Bryan Boreham and I did a deep-dive session on Cortex, an OSS Apache-licensed CNCF Sandbox project. A horizontally scalable, highly available, long term storage for Prometheus, Cortex powers Grafana Cloud’s hosted Prometheus. During our talk, we focused on the steps that we’ve taken to make Cortex’s query performance awesome.
We’ve all been in the situation where suddenly you are the lone developer on call while everyone is out of pocket. Or in the case of Grafana Labs Director of UX David Kaltschmidt, his then business partner, Grafana Labs VP of Product Tom Wilkie, was checking out for a weekend music fest. “Tom and I founded a company a couple of years ago, and I’m more of a frontend person. Tom did all the backend and devops stuff,” explained Kaltschimdt.
The three pillars of observability – monitoring, logging and tracing – are so 2018. At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU last week, Grafana Labs VP Product Tom Wilkie and Red Hat Software Engineer Frederic Branczyk, gave a keynote presentation about the future of observability and how this trifecta will evolve in 2019 and the years to come.
At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU this week, Grafana Labs VP Product Tom Wilkie gave a talk about Loki, the Prometheus-inspired service that optimizes search, aggregation, and exploration of logs natively in Grafana. In case you missed it, here’s a recap. Wilkie’s talk is an overview of how and why Grafana Labs built Loki and the features and architecture the team built in. Our policy is to develop projects in the open, so the design doc has been publicly accessible since development started.
It’s finally time for a new Grafana release again. Grafana 6.2 includes improved security, enhanced provisioning workflow, a new Bar Gauge panel, Elasticsearch 7 support, and lazy loading of panels, among other things.
Grafana Labs has been running Cortex for more than a year to power Hosted Prometheus in Grafana Cloud. We’re super happy: It’s been incredibly stable and has recently gotten insanely fast. Here’s what you need to know about Cortex, what we’ve been doing to Cortex in the past year, and what we plan on doing in the coming months.
Can you monitor us now? That was the question Verizon started asking as the Fortune 500 company expanded its portfolio beyond communications services to include brands such as Yahoo! and Huffpost. “We’re not just grandma’s landline,” Sean Thomas, Verizon Systems Engineering Manager, told the audience at GrafanaCon in L.A. “We’re not just your mobile provider. We are a media company. We have 5G solutions. We’re building technology.
There are countless Grafana dashboards that will only ever be seen internally. But there are also a number of large organizations that have made their dashboards public for a variety of uses. These dashboards can be interesting to browse, giving you an insider’s peek into how real Grafana users set up their visualizations, with actual live data to boot. Perhaps some of them will inspire you to get to work on your own Grafana?
“To start, your monitoring stack should not cost you stacks,” Sensu Software Engineer Nikki Attea told the crowd at GrafanaCon L.A. “Avocado toast is really expensive. But the good news is your monitoring solution doesn’t have to be.” To prove it, Attea presented an easy developer-centric use case that leverages Sensu, a monitoring event pipeline which collects, processes, and roots different event types including discovery, availability, telemetry, and alerts.
The Emergency Services team at Trapeze Group provides 24/7/365 support for ambulances in Australia. Each fleet can contain as many as 1,000 vehicles, with more than 60 telemetry channels and 120 million messages going in and out to paramedics every day.
“I’ve run a lot of systems in production, and a lot of what has gone into the Kubernetes project came out of scars that came from running web search in production and running API services,” Brendan Burns, the co-creator of Kubernetes, said at the top of his keynote at GrafanaCon L.A.
At Grafana Labs, we field questions about best practices from customers all the time. One company recently asked whether it should run a containerized Prometheus environment rather than a VM-based one. We thought we’d share our answer here too. So: Should you run Prometheus in a container?
The situation is all too familiar: You get an alert. You look at your metrics and your dashboards to try and find out what the cause might be and when the incident actually started (instead of when the alert happened). Then you have to go somewhere else to look at logs because eventually you need more data.
A very useful feature of Grafana is the ability to display dashboards and playlists on a large TV. Documentation on how to do this is sparse, which inspired this tutorial and also led to automating the process.
The Internet of Things has transformed people’s lives, enabling everything from “smart homes” to remote health monitoring. And now a startup called AMMP Technologies is using IoT – and Grafana – to help bring electricity to rural Africa. Hendrik Broering, COO and cofounder of AMMP, told the audience at GrafanaCon L.A. about a village in Tanzania called Changombe, with a population of about 2,000 and no access to electricity until 2017.
