Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

September 2022

Inside the migration from Consul to memberlist at Grafana Labs

At Grafana Labs we run a lot of distributed databases. These distributed databases all make use of a hash ring in order to evenly distribute workloads across replicas of certain components. For a more detailed description of the architecture of our projects, check out our Mimir architecture docs.

How to build machine learning models faster with Grafana

Armin Müller is the co-founder of ScopeSET. ScopeSET specializes in R&D work to build and integrate tools in the model-based systems engineering domain, with a track record of more than 15 years of delivering innovative solutions for ESA and the aerospace industry. Training machine learning models takes a lot of time, so we’re always looking for ways to accelerate the process at ScopeSET. We use open source components to build research and development tools for technical companies.

Troubleshoot in less than 60 seconds with Grafana: Inside NOS's observability stack

It may seem like ancient history, but there was a time when telecommunications companies only had to worry about connecting customers over landlines. Today, their businesses depend on vast cellular networks to not only provide strong wireless phone coverage in countless locations, but also handle the demands of tablets, computers, and machine-to-machine communications.

How to convert a mini-arcade machine into a Grafana dashboard display with Raspberry Pi

When COVID-19 hit, Yonatan Mevorach faced an unexpected challenge, which required an unexpected solution. The Infrastructure Team Lead at Wix, the popular website building platform, was accustomed to looking at multiple monitors on the walls of the software company’s offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. These monitors cycled through Grafana dashboards to help the team keep tabs on Wix’s many services.

Grafana alerts as code: Get started with Terraform and Grafana Alerting

Alerting infrastructure is often complex, with many pieces of the pipeline that often live in different places. Scaling this across many teams and organizations is an especially challenging task. As organizations grow in size, the observability component tends to grow along with it. For example, you may have many components, each of which needs a different set of alerts. You may have several teams, each with a different channel where notifications should be delivered.

How to easily configure Grafana Loki and Promtail to receive logs from Heroku

Heroku is a cloud provider well known for its simplicity and its support out of the box for multiple programming languages. When thinking about consuming logs from applications hosted in Heroku, Grafana Loki is a great choice. But in the past, shipping logs from Heroku to any Loki instance required ad-hoc scripts to fiddle with Heroku’s logs format and send them. This can be a time-consuming experience.

Grafana Cloud Metrics: A guide to what metrics to monitor and best practices

Metrics are the cornerstone of an observable system – they tell you a system’s measured outputs, granting visibility into what your customers are experiencing and when there’s a problem. However, not all methods for recording and saving metrics from a system’s output are alike. The best method for shipping your system’s metrics to Grafana Cloud depends on many factors, varying from the source of your metrics data to your familiarity with observability tools.

Is your plugin compatible with Grafana? There's a tool for that!

Here at Grafana Labs, we’re always striving to reduce the amount of effort needed to maintain plugins across different versions of Grafana. That is why we’re excited to provide you with a tool to check the compatibility of your plugin with the latest Grafana plugins API. We know that it can be frustrating for developers to find out people can’t use their plugins. Over the past few months, we’ve been working on detecting the breaking changes as soon as they happen.

Intro to Grafana Incident

In this video, you’ll learn how Grafana Incident offers a complete incident management process out of the box in Grafana Cloud, so you can save time and focus on what’s important when things go wrong. Grafana Incident is available to all free and paid Grafana Cloud users. If you’re not already using Grafana Cloud — the easiest way to get started with observability — sign up now for a free 14-day trial of Grafana Cloud Pro, with unlimited metrics, logs, traces, and users, long-term retention, and premium team collaboration features.

Building Grafana dashboards for a large-scale deployment in a tight timeline: Inside Cisco Live

How many Marvel movies’ worth of Internet traffic do 28,000 conference goers create during a five-day Cisco Live event? There’s a Grafana dashboard for that. Cisco Live is the network industry’s largest annual event, delivering education and inspiration to technology innovators worldwide with a week’s worth of programming keynotes, product announcements, entertainment, and more.

How to deploy the Grafana stack using Podman

You may be asking yourself: What exactly is Podman? Podman is short for Pod Manager and is a daemonless, open source container engine alternative to Docker that allows for rootless containers. Podman is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems. It only requires a simple and easy install on RPM-based Linuxes, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Rocky, or AlmaLinux.

New in Grafana Mimir: Introducing out-of-order sample ingestion

Traditionally the Prometheus TSDB only accepts in-order samples that are less than one hour old, discarding everything else. Having this requirement has allowed Prometheus to be extremely efficient with how it stores samples. And in practice, it really hasn’t really been much of a limitation for users because of the pull-based model in Prometheus, which scrapes data at a regular cadence off of the targets being observed. Several use cases, however, need out-of-order support.

How to reduce MTTR with Grafana Loki and Grafana Tempo: Inside the Houzz observability renovation

Houzz is where millions of homeowners and home improvement professionals go to seek inspiration and supplies for their remodeling projects. But to continue as the leading platform for home remodeling and design, the Houzz tech stack needed a renovation of its own as the company scaled. In response, the Houzz team began by revamping their monoliths into microservices.

How to get started with the new Grafana Ansible collection for Grafana Cloud

More than 20,000 companies around the world use Ansible as their Infrastructure as Code and configuration management tool. With the rising popularity towards managing infrastructure using IaC and config management tools, Ansible is one of the best open source tools to choose from. That is why we are excited to announce a new Grafana Ansible collection available to all Grafana Cloud users, including those in the generous free tier.