Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2022

How Theia Scientific and Volkov Labs use Grafana and AI to analyze scientific images

Dr. Christopher Field is Co-Founder, President, and Principal Investigator at Theia Scientific. With formal education in analytical chemistry and instrumentation, Chris has expertise in scientific hardware and software design, deploying embedded Linux devices for Internet of Things (IoT) and sensor fusion applications, and developing computer vision and image processing pipelines for cell analysis.

Deployment-time testing with Grafana k6 and Flagger

When it comes to building and deploying applications, one increasingly popular approach these days is to use microservices in Kubernetes. It provides an easy way to collaborate across organizational boundaries and is a great way to scale. However, it comes with many operational challenges. One big issue is that it’s difficult to test the microservices in real-life scenarios before letting production traffic reach them. But there are ways to get around it.

Introducing the new Confluent Cloud integration for Grafana Cloud

At Grafana Labs, we’re continuing to expand our platform of Grafana Cloud integrations that make it easier than ever to connect and monitor external systems. These integrations enable you to answer the big picture questions in your organization and tell your observability story.

Set up and observe a Spring Boot application with Grafana Cloud, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry

Spring Boot is a very popular microservice framework that significantly simplifies web application development by providing Java developers with a platform to get started with an auto-configurable, production-grade Spring application. In this blog, we will walk through detailed steps on how you can observe a Spring Boot application, by instrumenting it with Prometheus and OpenTelementry and by collecting and correlating logs, metrics, and traces from the application in Grafana Cloud.

New in the Kubernetes integration for Grafana Cloud: Kubernetes events, Pod logs, and more

The Kubernetes integration for Grafana Cloud helps users easily monitor and alert on core Kubernetes metrics using the Grafana Agent, our lightweight observability data collector optimized for sending metric, log, and trace data to Grafana Cloud. It packages together a set of easy-to-deploy manifests for the Agent, along with prebuilt dashboards and alerts.

Video: How to migrate to Grafana Mimir in less than 4 minutes

Since we launched Grafana Mimir — the most scalable, most performant open source time series database in the world — we have answered many of your questions about our latest open source project, including how to pronounce it. (All together now: /mɪ’mir/.) We have also walked through how we scaled Grafana Mimir to 1 billion active series.

eCommerce giant Blinkit's journey from ELK Stack to Grafana Cloud

The promise: Order any groceries and essentials from Blinkit’s mobile app, and they’ll be delivered to your doorstep within 10 minutes. The process: Very difficult with a legacy logging tool. For Blinkit, the instant delivery service formerly known as Grofers that serves millions of consumers across India, their tech stack was beginning to interfere with business operations at a time when the company was hyperscaling due to its popularity.

New in Grafana 8.5: updated panels, new RBAC features, simplified reporting, and more!

Grafana 8.5 is here! Download Grafana 8.5 We’ve worked on a variety of improvements that focus on Grafana’s usability, data visualization, and security. For a full list of new features and capabilities, check out our What’s New in Grafana 8.5 documentation. 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.

How Grafana Mimir's split-and-merge compactor enables scaling metrics to 1 billion active series

Grafana Mimir, our new open source time series database, introduces a horizontally scalable split-and-merge compactor that can easily handle a large number of series. In a previous blog post, we described how we did extensive load testing to ensure high performance at 1 billion active series. In this article, we will discuss the challenges with the existing Prometheus and Cortex compactors and the new features of Grafana Mimir’s compactor.

Service level objectives: How SLOs have changed the business of observability

Forget the latest tech gadgets and the newest products. One of the most talked about trends in observability right now? “SLOs have really become a buzzword, and everyone wants them,” said Grafana Labs principal software engineer Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein on a recent episode of “Grafana’s Big Tent,” our new podcast about people, community, tech, and tools around observability.

Video: Get started with Grafana Mimir in minutes

Since we launched Grafana Mimir — the most scalable, most performant open source time series database in the world — we have answered many of your questions about our latest open source project, including how to pronounce it. (All together now: /mɪ’mir/.) We have walked through how we scaled Grafana Mimir to 1 billion active series. And we will be hosting webinars to showcase cutting-edge features like query sharding and the two-stage compactor.

The ins, outs, and benefits of using Grafana Loki as a backend logging solution

As organizations have moved from monolithic to microservice-based architectures, there has been an explosion in the volume of logs generated. Most logging solutions create a full index of the logs and use SSD drives, which results in costly compute and storage resources for logs that are mostly write once, read never. We created Grafana Loki to solve these problems. Loki only indexes the metadata of the log lines, relies on inexpensive object storage, and is architected for scalability. In addition, Loki takes advantage of parallelism and sharding that results in fast query performance. In this session, we will discuss the benefits of using Loki as a backend logging solution.

Analyzing Cardinality in Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise Metrics

Cardinality Analysis of metrics is an enabler to reducing costs and focusing observability on the necessary metrics to identify and investigate where issues are occurring in your services. Grafana has added cardinality management dashboards to Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise Metrics to make this an easy and fast process. In this introductory session, we will provide an overview of the Grafana Cardinality features and offer a set of discovery questions to help you with the process.

How AgriTech used IoT and Grafana to help industrial hemp farmers hit a new production high

In 2019, Alexander Mann was working in the microchip industry, putting in 12-hour shifts that left no time for him to tend to his large vegetable garden. “I started looking for ways that I could remotely water or check on my plants,” he says. Products that could help him were either too costly for a hobby gardener or required special internet connections, so Mann decided to learn about IoT and create his own setup.

Monitoring critical systems at Roblox with Grafana and Grafana Agent

It’s like an obby unto itself: With roughly 100 million global active users, how does an observability team monitor operations and troubleshoot problems that pop up across more than 10,000 servers? In this session, you’ll get an inside look at how the Roblox team evolved their observability platform to combine a multitude of data sources, from low-level hardware health to high-level performance metrics. Grafana Agent plays a key role by replacing many special-purpose pipelines with a single, easy-to-manage tool. Roblox’s observability team has met growing demand to provide actionable insights to hundreds of engineers, covering dozens of data sources and thousands of Grafana dashboards, which all help keep its infrastructure running and ready for play.

New in Grafana Enterprise Metrics 2.0: Cross-tenant alerting and recording rules

On the heels of launching our new open source TSDB Grafana Mimir, we are excited to introduce Grafana Enterprise Metrics 2.0. GEM 2.0 is built on top of Grafana Mimir 2.0, our easy-to-operate, high-scale database which we’ve shown can handle upwards of 1 billion active series. That means that GEM 2.0 inherits all of the highlights of Mimir, including easy deployment, native multi-tenancy, high availability, durable long-term metrics storage, and exceptional query performance.

New in Grafana Loki 2.5: Faster queries, more log sources, so long S3 rate limits, and more!

I’m very excited to tell you all about the latest Grafana Loki installment, 2.5! A huge amount of work, nearly 500 PRs, has gone into Loki between v2.4 and now. The major themes for this release are improved performance, continuing ease of operations, and more ways to ingest your logs. I usually find myself the most excited about performance improvements, so let’s start there.

Grafana Labs EMEA Virtual Meetup - April 2022

Join Grafanistas Jessica Brown, Marcus Olsson, and Mat Ryer as they present at the April 2022 Grafana Labs Virtual EMEA Meetup. Here's a brief look at their talks: “Extend your Grafana experience through plugins” By default, Grafana comes with an impressive set of different visualizations and data source integrations. But that’s not all! Many more panels and data sources are available as plugins, built by the Grafana community. In this session, you’ll learn about the new in-app plugin catalog and a few nifty plugins to get you started using plugins!

How we scaled our new Prometheus TSDB Grafana Mimir to 1 billion active series

Last week, we announced our new open source TSDB, Grafana Mimir, which lets you scale your metrics monitoring to 1 billion active series and beyond. The announcement was greeted with a lot of excitement and interest – and some questions too. Namely: Really, 1 billion? Yes, really!

Grafana Labs announces $240 million Series D round led by GIC and welcomes new investor J.P. Morgan

Today, I’m happy to share that Grafana Labs has closed a $240 million Series D round of investment. This is a major milestone for us that goes well beyond the number of dollars. First, we are grateful to our internal team (affectionately called Grafanistas) and our community of users and customers. Without them, we would not have been given this opportunity.

How to use WebSockets to visualize real-time IoT data in Grafana

Mike Szczys is a Developer Relations Engineer at Golioth. His deep love of microcontrollers began in the early 2000s, growing from the desire to make more of the BEAM robotics he was building. When he’s not reading data sheets, he’s busy as an orchestra musician in Madison, Wisconsin. At Golioth, a commercial IoT development platform, we love using the power of Grafana to easily visualize data from IoT installations where tens, hundreds, or even thousands of devices are reporting back.