Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

November 2019

[KubeCon Recap] How to Debug Live Applications in Kubernetes

Joe Elliott, a backend engineer at Grafana Labs, took the stage in front of a packed house at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in San Diego to demonstrate a few of the tricks he uses to debug applications live in Kubernetes. The goal is to increase your knowledge of applications in the production environment. Elliott’s techniques are framework agnostic and Linux-specific, and they are most useful in situations where you have a known type of problem and application.

KubeCon Demo: A Preview of Grafana & Jaeger

At the Grafana Labs booth at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in San Diego this week, we showed a demo of a future feature for Grafana: distributed tracing datasources. Until now, Grafana has been bringing together metrics and logs, to be viewed side-by-side on one screen. Now we’re adding tracing, which has been a missing puzzle piece for even more observability in Grafana.

[PromCon Recap] Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity: Cortex and Thanos

This blog post is a writeup of the presentation Bartek Plotka and I gave at PromCon 2019. Cortex is a horizontally scalable, clustered Prometheus implementation aimed at giving users a global view of all their Prometheus metrics in one place, and providing long term storage for those metrics. Thanos is newer project aimed at solving the same challenges. In this blog post, we compare these two projects and see how it is possible to have two completely different approaches to the same problems.

Loki Reaches GA with v1.0.0 Release

Today is an exciting day for Loki, as we have decided it’s time for Loki to graduate out of beta and into a 1.0.0 GA release! It’s been just about a year since we announced Loki at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Seattle, and in that time over 137 contributors have made more than 1,000 contributions. Here’s a look at where the project is today.

5 Ways to Get Your Company to Buy Grafana Enterprise

In my role at Grafana Labs, I speak with a lot of engineers who feel the pain of their organizations’ lack of consolidated observability – so much so they set out to solve the problem themselves. Often, that search leads to Grafana, and after a quick exploration of what an enterprise feature or cloud solution can provide, they’ll get in touch. We work with them on data collection and help them start a trial.

ICYMI: Grafana Labs at PromCon

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.

How to Stream Sensor Data with Grafana and InfluxDB

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.

Metrics Documentation with the metrics2docs Tool

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.

How (and Why) I Make Grafana and Loki Tutorials for YouTube

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 :)