Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2023

How to configure OpenTelemetry .NET Automatic Instrumentation with Grafana Cloud

For those who have limited experience with OpenTelemetry, it can be intimidating to instrument.NET applications. But the OpenTelemetry community created a welcome shortcut with the first stable release of.NET Automatic Instrumentation. It simplifies the process of collecting metrics, logs, and traces from your.NET applications, without applying any changes to the source code or adding any dependencies to the OSS project.

Create a logs app plugin with Grafana Scenes and Grafana Loki

Grafana’s plugin tools help developers extend Grafana’s core functionality and create plugins faster, with a modern build setup and zero configuration. Grafana Scenes, meanwhile, is a new front-end library, introduced with Grafana 10, that enables developers to create dashboard-like experiences — such as querying and transformations, dynamic panel rendering, and time ranges — directly within Grafana application plugins.

How to integrate a Spring Boot app with Grafana using OpenTelemetry standards

Maciej Nawrocki, Senior Backend Developer at Bright Inventions, is a backend developer focused on DevOps and monitoring. Adam Waniak, Senior Backend Developer at Bright Inventions, is a backend developer with a keen interest in DevOps. Bright Inventions is a software consulting studio based in Gdansk, Poland, with expertise in mobile, web, blockchain, and IOT systems. At Bright Inventions, we always prioritize app optimization when we develop software solutions for our clients.

Real user monitoring with Grafana (Grafana Office Hours #17)

Have you heard of Grafana Faro and how it can help in providing insights into your real user experience? Developer Advocates Nicole van der Hoeven and Marie Cruz chat with Software Engineers Kostas Pelelis and Marco Schaefer to discuss what Grafana Faro is, why it's important to have a real user monitoring solution, and how to get started with Grafana Faro.

Grafana panel title generator, interactive visualizations, and more

Dive deep into the enhancements in Grafana 10.2. From embedding interactive buttons within Canvas visualizations to utilizing AI for dashboard titles and descriptions, this release brims with features designed to optimize your Grafana experience. In this video, discover how to: Stay with us through this playlist to delve deeper into each addition and maximize your Grafana 10.2 experience.

How to navigate alerting insights in Grafana Cloud

Navigate your alerting systems in Grafana Cloud with the new Alerting Insights feature. This enhanced landing page provides a comprehensive view of your alerting data, from Grafana managed rules to Mimir managed rules, and highlights critical trends in your organization's alert management performance.

The Grafana developer portal: your gateway to enhanced plugin development

As Grafana continues to evolve, we remain dedicated to improving the experience for Grafana users, as well as the developers building applications on top of the platform. Today, we are delighted to introduce the next step in that evolution, the all-new Grafana developer portal — a central hub of curated resources for developers who want to extend Grafana’s capabilities.

The benefits of web performance testing with Grafana k6 browser and Grafana Faro

Performance tests created with the Grafana k6 browser module use lab data collected from pre-defined environments, devices, and network settings. Lab data allows you to repeatedly reproduce performance results, making it useful for detecting and fixing performance issues early. Lab data, however, doesn’t account for one very important testing component: real user experience.

Grafana 10.2 release: Grafana panel title generator, interactive visualizations, and more

Grafana 10.2 is here! Download Grafana 10.2 As always, the latest version of Grafana includes a ton of dashboard and data visualization improvements. You can add interactive buttons to your Canvas visualizations; auto-generate dashboard panel titles, and descriptions using AI; and zoom in on specific y-axis values in your time series.

How Flexcity used Grafana Cloud to help balance the national power grid in France

Last winter, Flexcity — a market leader in electric flexibility — faced an unprecedented challenge: Help stabilize the French national power grid, in the midst of a widespread energy crisis that loomed over Europe. As a byproduct of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, energy prices in the EU soared in 2022. And France, meanwhile, faced a nuclear power outage that winter that threatened to significantly disrupt its energy supply and increase the risk of electricity shortages.

New in Grafana k6: The latest OSS features in v0.47.0 and more efficient performance testing in Grafana Cloud k6

Grafana k6 v0.47.0 has been released, featuring gRPC’s binary metadata support, new authentication methods, and tons of other improvements for Grafana k6 OSS. Here’s a quick overview of the latest features in Grafana k6 v0.47.0, as well as some other exciting updates related to Grafana Cloud k6 and the k6 community.

Kubernetes cost optimization: tips for a more efficient operation

Kubernetes offers unparalleled flexibility and scalability for containerized orchestration. However, this dynamism can also lead to unexpected costs if you don’t efficiently manage your corresponding cloud resources. In this blog, we’ll outline a series of best practices for Kubernetes cost optimization that will help you keep your infrastructure running smoothly while staying within your budget.

How to easily retrieve values from a range in Grafana using a stat panel

Grafana is an open source visualization and monitoring solution for correlating and analyzing data from various sources. From time series graphs to heatmaps to 3D charts, it gives you lots of ways to untangle complex datasets. And while that’s incredibly powerful for observability, sometimes you’re looking for something fairly straightforward.

Reproducing and testing distributed system failures with xk6-disruptor

Distributed systems, such as modern microservices-based applications, are highly scalable, but also highly complex. Dependencies and unexpected interactions between services are a common cause of incidents, and these incidents are also notoriously hard to test for. xk6-disruptor — an extension that adds fault injection capabilities to Grafana k6, the open source reliability and load testing tool — can help overcome these challenges.

Visualizing MongoDB with Grafana Cloud

Learn to connect your MongoDB data and other data sources to a single dashboard to provide impactful insights into your business and improve visibility across teams. Vijay Tolani will demonstrate how to translate and transform your existing application and business metrics into flexible and versatile charts within dashboards using a wide array of visualizations, such as panels, bar gauges, geomaps, and more. Also query and alert on MongoDB and MongoDB Atlas data in real time without having to migrate or ingest it.

Grafana Labs' new AI-powered chatbot

Got questions about Grafana? Just ask Grot, Grafana's new AI-powered chatbot (still in beta). Built in partnership with Pal, a company that creates AI assistants for businesses, and inspired by our bulbous dino mascot, Grot the chatbot has been trained with large language models (LLM) on Grafana Labs’ own content. It can help you easily answer just about any question about our Grafana LGTM Stack, our open and composable hosted Grafana Cloud platform, and more — regardless of how narrow or broad the query might be or what language is set in your browser.

Send Lambda traces to Grafana Cloud with OpenTelemetry

AWS’s serverless technologies are popular because they provide cost effective scaling and great separation of concerns. However, observing serverless architectures like Lambda is challenging due to their transient nature and abstracted infrastructure. Unlike traditional systems with consistent hosts, serverless functions are ephemeral, often scaling rapidly and operating in isolation.

Agentless monitoring for Prometheus in Grafana Cloud (Grafana Office Hours #15)

Did you know you could do agentless monitoring for Prometheus in Grafana Cloud? Senior Software Engineer Matt Nolf talks about the new Metrics Endpoint integration and how you can use it to collect Prometheus metrics from publicly addressable hosts-- WITHOUT using Grafana Agent. He is joined by Developer Advocates Nicole van der Hoeven and Paul Balogh.

How to embed Grafana dashboards into web applications

Grafana dashboards are powerful and flexible tools for observing applications and infrastructure, so it’s no surprise we get a lot of questions from the community about how to embed them into their web applications. Over the past few releases, we’ve developed a lot of options for how to do this in Grafana, but there can be confusion about how they work, and when to use each approach.

Grafana Agent v0.37: Feature parity between Static and Flow mode, easy migration configs, and more

Grafana Agent v0.37 is here! This new release brings a lot of exciting new features and marks the pinnacle of a year-long effort to achieve feature parity between Grafana Agent Flow mode and Grafana Agent Static mode. We also extended our config converter to ease the migration from Static to Flow mode and we added the possibility to split your Flow configuration into multiple files. Please make note of some breaking changes in this release.

Distributed tracing with Grafana Cloud k6 (Grafana Office Hours #14)

Senior Software Engineer Łukasz Gut talks about a new feature: Distributed Tracing with Grafana Cloud k6. He discusses what distributed tracing is, why it matters, and how it can help teams find reliability issues faster. He is joined by Developer Advocates Marie Cruz and Nicole van der Hoeven.

Unify and query private network data in Grafana Cloud: Private Data Source Connect is now GA

You may be ready to make the move to Grafana Cloud, but securely querying private data has been a blocker. If you wanted to query a network-secured data source like a MySQL database or an Elasticsearch cluster that is hosted in an on-premises private network or a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), you needed to open your network to inbound queries from a range of IP addresses.

How to securely send your telemetry to Grafana Cloud using AWS PrivateLink

Using Grafana Cloud to manage and monitor even your most sensitive data from your AWS services just got easier. If your organization’s workloads are hosted in AWS and you are using a Grafana Cloud instance that’s also hosted in AWS, you can now use AWS PrivateLink to establish a secure connection between your virtual private cloud (VPC) network and Grafana Cloud for all your data.

AWS PrivateLink for Grafana Cloud

Navigating secure connectivity and managing data transfer costs are vital to optimizing your cloud-based services. AWS PrivateLink offers a solution to improve security and reduce costs, especially when integrating with Grafana Cloud. In this tutorial, we delve into the problems solved by PrivateLink, its working mechanism, and a step-by-step guide on configuring it to connect to Grafana services. What You'll Learn.

How continuous profiling improved code performance for a new Grafana Loki feature

Throughout the software development process, engineers can use a number of methods and tools to ensure their code is efficient. When using Go, for example, there are built-in tools, including those for benchmarking and CPU/memory profiling, to check how efficiently code will run. Engineers can also run unit tests to validate code quality.

Reducing data center carbon emissions with Hardware Sentry, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry

With just 30 employees, Sentry Software might be considered a small company, but they’re prioritizing sustainability in a big way. As the makers of Hardware Sentry, an IT monitoring software, a large part of their business relies on maintaining optimal temperature conditions at their data centers — an operation that contributes to the company’s overall carbon footprint.