Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

August 2022

How adding Kubernetes label selectors caused an outage in Grafana Cloud Logs - and how we resolved it

Hello, I’m Callum. I work on Grafana Loki, including the hosted Grafana Cloud Logs offering. Grafana Loki is a distributed multi-tenant system for storing log data — ingestion, querying, all that fun stuff. It also powers Grafana Cloud Logs.

Get started with Grafana OnCall and Terraform

Managing on-call schedules and escalation chains, especially across many teams, can get cumbersome and error prone. This can be especially difficult without as-code workflows. Here on the Grafana OnCall team, we’re focused on making Grafana OnCall as easy to use as possible. We want to make it easier to reduce errors with your on-call schedules, create schedule and escalation templates quickly, and fit on-call management into your existing as-code patterns.

New in Grafana Alerting: File provisioning

We are happy to announce that file provisioning for Grafana Alerting has arrived in Grafana 9.1. This feature enables you to configure your whole alerting stack using files on disk, as you may already do with data sources or dashboards. The Terraform Grafana provider has also been updated to allow the provisioning of Grafana Alerting resources.

New in Grafana 9.1: Service accounts are now GA

With the Grafana 8.5 release, we introduced the concept of service accounts. Now with the Grafana 9.1 release, we’re making service accounts generally available. This is a project that came out of technical necessity, but it has given us the opportunity to reflect on API tokens and machine-to-machine interaction across Grafana Labs.

Grafana Tempo 1.5 release: New metrics features with OpenTelemetry, Parquet support, and the path to 2.0

Grafana Tempo 1.5 has been released with a number of new features. In particular, we are excited that this is the first release with experimental support for the new Parquet-based columnar store. Read on to get a high-level overview of all the new changes in Grafana Tempo! If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can also dig into the hairy details of the changelog.

How Denmark's Energinet uses Grafana Enterprise to monitor underwater energy cables - and do detective work

If an energy cable running through the waters surrounding Denmark gets damaged by a passing vessel, does it make a sound? Yes. . . and it’s the ping of a Grafana alert at the offices of Energinet, an independent public enterprise owned by the Danish Ministry of Climate, Energy, and Utilities.

New in Grafana 9.1: Trace to metrics allows users to navigate from a trace span to a selected data source

Traces, logs, and metrics provide inherently different views into a system, which is why correlating between them is important. With features like exemplar support, trace to logs, and span references, you can quickly jump between most telemetry signals in Grafana. With the release of Grafana 9.1, we’re improving Grafana’s ability to correlate different signals by adding the functionality to link between traces and metrics.

New in Grafana 9.1: Share your Grafana dashboard with anyone via public dashboards

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new feature we’ve been working on in Grafana 9.1: public dashboards 🎉. The public dashboards feature will allow you to share your Grafana dashboard with anyone, even if they’re not part of your Grafana organization. Historically, the only way that someone could share a dashboard externally was taking a one-time snapshot 📸, or disabling all authorization for their Grafana instance 😬.

Grafana 9.1 release: New Grafana panels, RBAC for plugins, public dashboards, and more!

Grafana 9.1 is here! Get Grafana 9.1 We’ve made a number of improvements to Grafana’s usability, data visualization, and security. For a full list of new features and capabilities, check out our What’s New in Grafana 9.1 documentation. You can get started with Grafana in minutes with Grafana Cloud. We have a generous free forever tier as well as plans to suit every use case — sign up for free now. Here are some of the highlights in Grafana 9.1.

How Veterans United Home Loans uses Grafana Cloud to help military families become homeowners

Veterans United Home Loans is the top VA lender for home buyers in the United States and has been making the dream of homeownership a reality for veterans and military families for more than two decades. A big part of making that dream come true is keeping their services – including both internal applications and a robust digital experience for their borrowers – highly performant.

Using Grafana and machine learning to analyze microscopy images: Inside Theia Scientific's work

At GrafanaCONline 2022, Theia Scientific President, Managing Member, and Lead Developer Chris Field and Volkov Labs founder and CEO Mikhail Volkov — a Grafana expert — delivered a presentation about using Grafana and machine learning for real-time microscopy image analysis. Real-time microscopy image analysis involves capturing images on a microscope using a digital device such as a PC, iPad, or camera.

Grafana usage insights: How to track who is sending what metrics to your stack in Grafana Cloud

We are happy to announce the release of the Grafana usage groups feature in Grafana Cloud. This new feature — which is available in the Grafana Cloud Advanced plan — helps centralized observability teams and administrators track and attribute metrics usage back to groups that exist within a single shared Grafana stack. Ultimately, Grafana usage groups can help with governance and cost control.

The updated Docker integration in Grafana Cloud now supports logs and metrics

More than 17 million developers use Docker to build, ship, and run applications separate from their infrastructure in order to deliver software faster and more efficiently. With the rising popularity of containerized applications, however, it has become increasingly more complex and difficult to observe and monitor applications running across multiple containers.

Video: How to get started with MongoDB and Grafana

MongoDB is one of the most popular NoSQL databases in the world, used by millions of developers to store application metrics from e-commerce transactions to user logins. The MongoDB Enterprise plugin for Grafana — which is available for users with a Grafana Cloud account or with a Grafana Enterprise license — unlocks all of the data stored in MongoDB as well as diagnostic metrics for monitoring MongoDB itself for visualization, exploration, and alerting.

Monitoring smart city IoT devices with Grafana and Grafana Loki: Inside the Fuelics observability stack

For smart cities of the future, monitoring infrastructure metrics like fuel and water levels is vital to optimizing operations. Fuelics PC designs and deploys battery-operated narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) sensors that monitor fuel, water, waste, and even parking capacity at the edge, then transmit that data to the cloud for easy viewing and monitoring.

How to deploy Grafana Enterprise Metrics on Red Hat OpenShift

Here at Grafana Labs, we’re always looking for ways to provide our customers with a choice of platforms where they can run Grafana Enterprise Metrics (GEM). As part of that mission, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve added Red Hat OpenShift 4.x support to GEM. GEM, as you may know, is a leading enterprise metrics solution.

How activist engineers use Grafana Cloud to improve global air quality

With climate change and other environmental factors causing pollution rates and ground-level Ozone levels to climb, poor air quality is an increasingly growing global problem. In fact, fossil air pollution is responsible for 1 out of 5 deaths worldwide, according to a 2021 study conducted by Harvard University.

Grafana Alerting video: How to create alerts in Grafana 9

With the Grafana 9.0 release, we rolled out the new and improved Grafana Alerting experience, which is now the default alerting system across all of our products. Along with introducing significant improvements to Grafana Alerting based on community feedback and more robust alerting documentation to guide our users, we also created easy-to-follow video tutorials to help you get started with creating alerts.