Grafana Agent v0.38 has hit the digital shelves just before the holiday season! 🧑🎄 The elves over at Grafana Labs have been quietly working on Grafana Agent, with more than 50 updates for all SREs and developers to use — no matter if you’re on the naughty or nice list. This includes new features, improvements, bug fixes, and significant ease-of-use changes.
Learning about the past helps us understand the present, and even predict the future. So, whether you are monitoring CPU usage or how long your IoT device was powered on and then off, at some point, you might want to know the difference of a value over time. InfluxDB is an open source database for storing and retrieving time series data. Thanks to its own query languages — flux and InfluxQL — it provides different and powerful ways to analyze data.
Here's the Grafana Office Hours with Matt Durham and Paul Balogh, where we discuss Grafana Agent Flow mode and how it's better than static mode: https://youtube.com/live/-_SsFLoJvoc
And check out the documentation for flow mode here: https://grafana.com/docs/agent/latest/flow/
Since we introduced role-based access control (RBAC) in Grafana 9.0, users — and later, service accounts — have been required to have an assigned role that includes a basic set of permissions. This sometimes led organizations to create users and service accounts that had more permissions than necessary. As a result, Grafana administrators had to make additional adjustments to users’ permissions on a case-by-case basis.
When you use OpenTelemetry SDKs to collect logs, metrics, and traces from infrastructure or an application, you’ll find many references to people using Grafana Agent and OpenTelemetry Collector. They start with an application or infrastructure that sends telemetry, and that data is sent to a collector, which then sends it to a backend like Grafana that may perform many functions, including visualization.
Observability isn’t just about watching for errors or monitoring for basic health signals. Instead, it goes deeper so you can understand the “why” behind the behaviors within your system. CI/CD observability plays a key part in that. It’s about gaining an in-depth view of the entire pipeline of your continuous integration and deployment systems — looking at every code check-in, every test, every build, and every deployment.
ObservabilityCON 2023 took place in London this week, showcasing all the latest and greatest trends in open source observability. Following the opening keynote, the event featured a range of breakout sessions — led by both Grafana Labs experts and members of the Grafana OSS community — that explored observability best practices and lessons learned.
The OpenTelemetry project provides many different components and instrumentations that support different languages and telemetry signals. However, new users often find it hard to pick the right ones and configure them properly for their specific use cases. For this reason, OpenTelemetry defines the concept of a distribution, which is a tailored and customized version of OpenTelemetry components. Here at Grafana Labs, we are all-in on OpenTelemetry.
The OpenTelemetry project provides many different components and instrumentations that support different languages and telemetry signals. However, new users often find it hard to pick the right ones and configure them properly for their specific use cases. For this reason, OpenTelemetry defines the concept of a distribution, which is a tailored and customized version of OpenTelemetry components. Here at Grafana Labs, we are all-in on OpenTelemetry.
When we began offering Grafana Cloud Metrics, we set a service level agreement (SLA) for 99.5% of requests to be completed within a few seconds. So we built an alert that would go off if more than 0.5% of requests were slower than a couple of seconds within a five-minute moving window. Sounds reasonable, right?
During the opening keynote of ObservabilityCON 2023 in London, we announced a range of new updates to make it easier and faster for the open source observability community to get started and scale their observability stacks.
As more organizations adopt observability at massive scale, they have also been grappling with rising costs. Over the past 12 months, we have been working on different solutions to help our users better understand and manage their observability stack, not to mention the bills that come with scaling it.
Just two months after introducing the public preview of Grafana Beyla, we are excited to announce the general availability of the open source project with the release of Grafana Beyla 1.0 at ObservabilityCON 2023 today. We’ve worked hard in the last two months to stabilize, stress test, and refine the features that were part of the public preview of this open source eBPF auto-instrumentation tool.
At Grafana Labs, our mission has always been to help our users and customers understand the behavior of their applications and services. Over the past two years, the biggest needs we’ve heard from our customers have been to make it easier to understand their observability data, to extend observability into the application layer, and to get deeper, contextualized analytics.
The Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics) offers the freedom and flexibility for monitoring application performance. But we’ve also heard from many of our users and customers that you need a solution that makes it easier and faster to get started with application monitoring.
At Grafana Labs we meet our users where they are. We run our services in every major cloud provider, so they can have what they need, where they need it. But of course, different providers offer different services — and different challenges. When we first landed on AWS in 2022 and began using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), we went with Cluster Autoscaler (CA) as our autoscaling tool of choice.
As Grafana evolved over the years, so did our panel headers. In our quest for improvement, we continually added design options that created more comprehensive panels, but also an increasingly complex interface. It was a process of continual adaptation without a roadmap — which, though well-intentioned, began to result in unforeseen challenges.
At Grafana Labs, we want to empower our fellow Grafanistas and the community to get the most out of the Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, and Mimir for metrics). As part of this effort, we recently launched a new Grafana developer portal. And now, we’re pleased to announce the launch of the Saga Design System, which establishes a shared visual language for all of Grafana Labs’ offerings.
Starting around June this year, we upgraded our Grafana databases in Grafana Cloud from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8, due to MySQL 5.7 reaching end-of-life in October. This project involved tens of thousands of customer databases across dozens of MySQL database servers, multiple cloud providers, and many Kubernetes clusters.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023 is just around the corner, and the OSS and cloud native community is eagerly anticipating the event, which will take place November 6 - 9 in Chicago.
In the ever-changing field of artificial intelligence, OpenAI is consistently seen as a leader in innovation. Its AI models, starting with GPT-3 and now with GPT-4, are already used extensively in software development and content creation, and they’re expected to usher in entire sets of new systems in the future.
Grafana Tempo 2.3 has been unleashed upon the world, bringing with it the latest iteration of the vParquet backend! Tempo 2.3 has a little bit of everything, but the headline item here is vParquet3 and new features that improve search speeds. Watch the video above for all the details, or continue reading to get a quick overview of the latest updates in Tempo. If you’re looking for something more in-depth, don’t hesitate to jump into the changelog or our Grafana Tempo 2.3 release notes.
