Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

July 2021

How we're working with the Elastic team to make the Elasticsearch data source for Grafana even more powerful

Back in March, we announced that Grafana Labs was partnering with Elastic to build an official Elasticsearch plugin for Grafana. As our CEO Raj Dutt wrote at the time, our “big tent” philosophy “means that we want to support data sources that our users are passionate about. Elasticsearch is one of the most popular data platforms that can be visualized in Grafana.”

Grafana Labs joins the CNCF Governing Board as a Platinum member of the open source foundation

At Grafana Labs, we are proud to be one of the largest code contributors to Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects. We are currently the leading company contributor to Prometheus, and also make substantial contributions to Cortex, Thanos, Jaeger, and OpenTelemetry. Our own open source projects — Grafana, Grafana Loki, and Grafana Tempo — have also become fundamental parts of the cloud native ecosystem.

Learn how to use the Jira, ServiceNow, GitHub, and GitLab plugins for Grafana for better visibility into software development

GitHub, GitLab, Jira, and ServiceNow are some of the most popular software development tools out there, and Grafana has powerful integrations with each of them. Join us for a live webinar on July 29 at 9:30 PT / 12:30 ET / 16:30 UTC for a demo of these data source plugins and best practices for creating a single pane of glass for viewing your software operations metrics. You can register here.

Get comprehensive monitoring for your Apache Kafka ecosystem instances quickly with Grafana Cloud

We are happy to announce that the Kafka integration is available for Grafana Cloud, our composable observability platform bringing together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. Apache Kafka is an open source distributed event streaming platform that provides high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.

How Grafana helps organizations manage SLOs across multiple monitoring data sources

“SLO is a favorite word of SREs,” Grafana Labs Principal Software Engineer Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein said during his talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2019. “Of course, it’s also great for design decisions, to set the right goals, and to set alerting in the right way. It’s everything that is good.” So what happens when things go bad?

Grafana Labs welcomes the Pace.dev team, experts in building tools with great developer experience

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.

How Pernod Ricard uses Grafana and Loki to scale and monitor its global e-commerce business

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.

IoT at your home, work, or data center with Prometheus metrics and Grafana Cloud

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.

How to visualize your business performance with cohort tables using Grafana and BigQuery

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.

How to set up synthetic monitoring at scale with Grafana Cloud

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.

How astronomers use Grafana dashboards to read the stars (and their data) on the SOFIA airborne observatory

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.

What's new in Grafana Enterprise Metrics 1.4: Cross-cluster query federation and self-monitoring

We introduced Grafana Enterprise Metrics (GEM) last September to give centralized observability teams the ability to provide a multi-tenanted, horizontally scalable Prometheus-as-a-Service experience for their end users. Since then, we’ve continued to make improvements and introduce new functionality. In this blog, I wanted to take a deeper dive into two of the exciting new features released with GEM 1.4.

Monitoring UV sensors on the International Space Station with Grafana

In space, there’s no atmosphere to protect against the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. Astronauts in orbit are exposed to the equivalent of eight X-rays a day, and the space stations and suits that protect them degrade over time due to radiation and other factors. Scientists working on the International Space Station (ISS) want to know more about ultraviolet (UV) radiation in orbit so they can design better materials.

What's new in Grafana Cloud for July 2021: Traces, live streaming, Kubernetes and Docker integrations, and more

If you’re not already familiar with it, Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started observing metrics (Prometheus and Graphite), logs (Grafana Loki), traces (Grafana Tempo), and dashboards. Here are the latest features you should know about!

How to quickly find unused metrics and get more value from Grafana Cloud

As the complexity of software systems explodes, so does the amount of data that gets generated by instrumenting these systems. This poses a problem for our users — especially those who are in charge of observability teams and observability platforms at large enterprises. They have to strike the right balance between cost management and giving teams the freedom to instrument whatever they want. Often observability leaders are supporting dozens of teams that are using hundreds of dashboards.

Using Grafana, academics created a next-level dashboard tracking the impact of Covid-19 in Romania

When Covid-19 hit Romania, it was difficult for ordinary citizens to get good information about the pandemic and its escalating impact on the country. The government, presiding over one of the least developed healthcare infrastructures in the European Union, was releasing bulletins via PDF and text that were neither timely nor all that accurate. Into the breach stepped a team of six volunteers—five economists and a data scientist—operating out of Babes-Bolyai University.