Dashboards

With 2024 coming to a close, it’s a good time to reflect on how Grafana Cloud has evolved this year — and synthetic monitoring, in particular, is one area where we’ve really focused our efforts. In May, we rolled out a revamped version of Grafana Cloud Synthetic Monitoring with the overall goal of making your monitoring processes not just more efficient, but more impactful.

Connecting to data sources in a private network or an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) can require extra attention to the network security configuration to prevent unintended network exposure. For example, 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, you would need to open your network to inbound queries from a range of IP addresses.

I’m a big fan of tasting menus. In the culinary world they let us sample a variety of dishes in small portions, helping us understand and appreciate different flavors and options. Inspired by this concept and a talk I gave earlier this year, I have crafted a “tasting menu” of OpenTelemetry Collector configurations in Grafana Cloud.

While we all love open source technology and the community that comes with it, we don’t always have the time or resources to stand up, maintain, update, and troubleshoot a self-hosted OSS stack. This is one of the (many) reasons companies choose to implement Grafana Cloud: you get all the goodness of the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics) in a fully managed, end-to-end observability platform.

After releasing our first version of the ilert dashboard as a static layout, we knew we wanted to take it further by allowing users to customize and arrange widgets freely. We aimed to provide a truly interactive experience, which led us to search for a library that could handle drag-and-drop and resizing functionalities while integrating well with our existing tech stack.

Migrating from other vendors becomes a lot easier with OpenTelemetry and Grafana Alloy, our distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector. But when you come from platforms that use different temporalities, such as Datadog or Dynatrace, you face a challenge integrating with a Prometheus-like ecosystem such as Grafana Cloud: Your metrics still mean the same as before, but they just don’t look right.

Ken has over 15 years of industry experience as a noted information and cybersecurity practitioner, software developer, author, and presenter, focusing on endpoint security, big security data analytics, and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and NIST 800-53 compliance. Focusing on strict federal standards, Ken has consulted with numerous federal organizations, including Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Census Bureau.

The Grafana Loki 3.3 release is here, and it brings a fresh wave of enhancements aimed at making your log management experience faster, more efficient, and more scalable. While this update includes the usual round of bug fixes and operational improvements, the standout feature is a shift in how Loki leverages Bloom filters—going from free-text search to harnessing the power of structured metadata.