“How am I supposed to debug this?" Just imagine: Late Friday, you are about to shut down your laptop and … an issue comes up. Warnings, alerts, red colors. Everything that we, developers, hate the most. The architect decided to develop that system based on microservices. Hundreds of them! You, as a developer, think why? Why does the architect hate me so much? And then, the main question of the moment: How am I supposed to debug this?

Over the years, we’ve heard many versions of the same familiar story: large businesses struggling with observability data living in several different systems. At Grafana Labs, our “big tent” philosophy is based on the belief that our users should determine their own observability strategy and choose their own tools. Grafana allows them to bring together and understand all their data, no matter where it lives.

Grafana Tempo 1.1 has been released, and like our major version suggests, there are no breaking changes. If you’d like, please check out the release notes . But if you find that release notes can sometimes be difficult to decode, fret not! All the highlights are below.

We’re thrilled to announce the release of Grafana Enterprise Metrics (GEM) 1.5. While this release packs in a ton of enhancements and bug fixes, we’d like to dive into two particularly exciting features: per-tenant usage metrics and a wildcard tenant for queries.

This morning, we announced that Grafana Labs has raised $220 million in Series C funding . As with our previous rounds in 2019 and 2020 , this funding will enable us to focus on accelerating the development of our open source observability platform and supporting the success of our community and our customers.

On the last day of GrafanaCONline in June, our CEO Raj Dutt announced that Grafana Labs had acquired k6 , the company behind the open source load-testing tool. In fact, our relationship with k6 had started more than two years earlier. At the beginning of 2019, we were working on replacing Grafana’s “remember me” cookie solution with a short-lived token solution for the Grafana 6.0 release.

Companies are always looking for transparency and visibility when it comes to monitoring, but as monitoring requirements and methods evolve, it’s not always easy to keep up. That’s why Opsdis, an observability consulting company based in Göteborg, Sweden, was founded. The firm focuses solely on helping clients implement systems for monitoring and metrics so they can keep up with the ever-expanding world of cloud computing and containerized environments.

In my role as a software engineer at Grafana Labs, I recently worked on a project that involved generating PromQL queries. One of the ways we verified the correctness of the generated queries was with a suite of integration tests. These tests would execute the generated PromQL queries against a local instance of the Prometheus query engine with some test data, and verify the results were as expected.

Last week at Grafana Labs, we launched our new Grafana Meetup Program with our East Coast Virtual Meetup. It was a ton of fun bringing together the community for this first event in our meetup series, but the road to getting here has been quite a journey! As a community-driven company, going more than a year without any in-person events has been pretty rough on all of us Grafanistas.

The Worldmap panel in Grafana is an existing feature in OSS that has been widely used, but it has some limits that weren’t easily fixed. Now with the release of Grafana v8.1 , we have introduced an upgrade to the Worldmap panel with the new Geomap panel visualization that allows you to view and customize a world map using geospatial data, all while sharing the same infrastructure with our core UI.

A typical IoT application with any physical system or process in the field can have hundreds of on-site sensors generating copious amounts of data every second and possibly communicating in several different protocols.

Within the world of robotics and automation one of the most recurring needs is that of capturing and visualizing real-time data from hardware components such as sensors and actuators, which provide insights into how a system is behaving overall and helps diagnose any potential issues that might arise overtime.

At Seniorlink, we provide services and technology to support families caring for their loved ones at home. In the past two years we’ve expanded our programs across the United States, and so our need to observe our application systems has grown too.

The power of community makes Grafana one of the most composable platforms for monitoring and observability across a wide variety of use cases. The Grafana Plugin Directory features not just plugins created by our team here at Grafana Labs, but by Grafana community members all over the world. It’s the best place to browse for new data source integrations, panels, and applications you can install on your dashboard to extend Grafana’s functionality.

Writing LogQL queries to access Loki’s log data just got easier, thanks to the new pattern parser released with Loki 2.3. It makes writing queries for unstructured log formats simple. And the pattern parser can be an order of magnitude faster than the regular expression parser. Let’s take a closer look.

Excellent new features have arrived in Loki v2.3.0. Bug fixes too. And performance increases on top of that. While we have been quiet, we have been very busy!

We are excited to announce the release of Grafana 8.1. This release builds upon our promise of a composable, open observability platform with new visualizations and dynamic panel configuration options while extending the functionality we launched in Grafana 8.0. Get 8.1 You can get started with Grafana in minutes with Grafana Cloud. We have free and paid Grafana Cloud plans to suit every use case — sign up for free now. And now, on to the highlights for 8.1.

We recently heard that a customer, a power user of Prometheus, was grappling with 18,000 individual rules for its metrics, because its setup involved creating an individual rule group for each generated metric. Surely there was a better, more efficient way to handle this scale of metrics? In fact, we did come up with a solution, and this blog post will walk you through how you might benefit from it too.

Back in February, we introduced Grafana Enterprise Logs (GEL) into the Grafana Enterprise Stack. GEL is a new way for large organizations to ingest and query their full log volume, without the cost or operational complexity associated with other solutions. (View a demo here.) We just released GEL 1.1, and one of its key features is label-based access control (LBAC).

Qiao Han is a Software Engineer at BasisAI and co-author of Boxkite. He is interested in everything related to observability and has contributed to popular open source projects like libcurl and aiohttp. This post is written together with his coworker Linh Nguyen, who is a Tech Lead at BasisAI.