Behind every feature in Grafana, no matter how big or small, lies a lot of hard work, commitment, and attention to detail. At Grafana Labs, we use a cross-functional team approach to come up with ideas and solutions that ultimately make our products more usable, resilient, and adaptable to user needs. To achieve this, we work collaboratively across the UX, product, and engineering disciplines.
Role-based access control (RBAC), previously referred to as fine-grained access control (FGAC), is Grafana’s new authorization system. It was introduced as a beta feature in Grafana 8.0 release a year ago, and we’re now excited to promote it to general availability status. With the release of Grafana 9.0 during GrafanaCONline 2022, RBAC is enabled by default for all instances. (The easiest way to get started with Grafana 9? Sign up for a free Grafana Cloud account today.)
In this guide, we’ll set up an OpenTelemetry Collector that collects logs and sends them to Grafana Loki running in Grafana Cloud. We will consider two examples for sending logs to Loki via OpenTelemetry Collector. The first one shows how to collect container logs with a Fluent Forward receiver. The second one shows how to collect system logs with a Filelog receiver.
Grafana is an open source tool for people with many different perspectives and various skill levels. Many initiatives to improve the Grafana user experience start by thinking about someone who’s just getting started on their observability journey. However, late last year, a Grafana Labs hackathon team looked to improve the user experience for our power users by introducing a command palette to Grafana.
We are happy to announce that an official Google BigQuery data source plugin for Grafana has arrived! Based on the popular DoiT International BigQuery DataSource community plugin, the new Grafana BigQuery plugin brings a new and improved query editor experience plus support for all BigQuery data types, Grafana Alerting, and query caching.
GrafanaCONline 2022 wrapped up on Friday, and the big finish featured sessions that covered important changes in Grafana Labs technical documentation, Grafana Cloud’s role in activist engineering projects, and the benefits of load testing with k6. There was also a great success story out of East Africa, where a major bank switched to a business monitoring system with Grafana and improved its customer satisfaction and revenue.
Three times a year, Grafanistas around the world step away from their daily responsibilities for one week and put their creative energy into what has quickly become a cultural touchstone at Grafana Labs: Our company-wide hackathon.
GrafanaCONline 2022 is still going strong, with sessions that covered alerting in Grafana 9, developments in Grafana Loki, and some winning Loki use cases. Plus, there was a talk about building an a F1 telemetry analysis solution that uses Grafana Cloud, along with plenty of dashboard discussions.
The excitement around GrafanaCONline 2022 continues to soar after another day filled with demos of new features and functionalities in Grafana 9, Grafana Mimir, and Grafana Tempo. Plus we learned how a mini arcade turned into a Grafana display; how Grafana transformed into a health tracker, and how, yes, Grafana can run Doom.
GrafanaCONline 2022 is off to a great start with exciting news from around the Grafana-verse and a jam-packed day filled with dashboards showcasing how Grafana is used in space, in industrial IoT, at live events, and even in an effort to prevent food waste.
We have lift off! GrafanaCONline 2022 officially launched today with the opening keynote featuring Grafana Labs CEO and Co-founder Raj Dutt, Chief Grafana Officer and Co-founder Torkel Ödegaard, and Senior Engineering Manager Myrle Krantz. Along with previewing the much-anticipated release of Grafana 9.0, we revealed some exciting news for our open source community. Below is a summary of all the major headlines that mark one small step for Grafana, one giant leap for the Grafana community.
GrafanaCONline, our annual community event designed for Grafana open source users and dashboarding enthusiasts, also marks the general availability of Grafana’s latest and greatest release. Grafana 9.0 is now available to both open source and Grafana Enterprise users, and is being rolled out to Grafana Cloud users incrementally. (The majority of instances have already been upgraded!) New Grafana Cloud users will immediately get the Grafana 9.0 experience.
Grafana 8 marked a major redesign in the way we do alerting. We created a unified alerting experience that implemented a workflow that operates across all of our products and combined Grafana panel alerts and Prometheus-style alerts into a single pane of glass. We built this as an open source feature first to make sure you could opt in and try it out from day one, regardless of which flavor of Grafana (OSS, Cloud, or Enterprise) works best for you.
Last November, we announced the launch of Grafana OnCall, an easy-to-use on-call management tool that helps reduce toil through simpler workflows and interfaces tailored for developers. Born out of Grafana Labs' acquisition of Amixr Inc., Grafana OnCall began as a cloud-only solution that became generally available to all Grafana Cloud users, on both paid and free plans, in February.
As a software engineer here at Grafana Labs, I’ve learned there are two questions that commonly come up when someone begins setting up a new Loki installation: “How many logs can I ingest into my cluster?” followed by, “How fast can I query these logs?” There are two ways to find out the answers.
When I started at Grafana in January, I was accustomed to working with private clouds and on-prem infrastructure, so nearly everything in my role here as a senior software engineer for the Grafana Mimir customer squad was new to me. I was new to Golang, Docker, Kubernetes, gRPC, public cloud services, etc. Kubernetes has been especially challenging. In my work on Grafana Mimir and Grafana Enterprise Metrics, I experience k8s in one of two extremes.
There is one universal truth about using Grafana: Dashboards are easy to create, but not-so-easy to organize. As organizations scale, there’s a high risk of unchecked dashboard sprawl, when dashboards become an unmanageable mess. As the number of users increase, so does their dashboard output. Our guide to dashboard management gives an overview of features that help with organizing dashboards, but there are still two pain points.
In May, a team from Grafana Labs descended on Valencia, Spain, to share their latest insights on the cloud native landscape at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2022. Along with diving into the future of Kubernetes monitoring with kubectl alpha events and multi-cloud deployments, Grafanistas presented an overview of the Prometheus ecosystem with an eye towards how sparse high-resolution histograms are going to change the game.
Creating an observability strategy is a lot like playing with Legos: It takes small building blocks to create a bigger picture, but the slightest mistake could throw off an entire build — and often you realize it very late in the process and have to rip and repair the Hogwarts castle infrastructure you spent many days creating.
