The classic debate when running a software as a service (SaaS) business is between release frequency vs. stability and availability. In other words, are you Team MTTR (mean time to recovery) or Team MTBF (mean time between failure)? In this blog post, I argue for MTTR, which encourages you to push more frequently, embrace the instability this may introduce, and invest in training and tooling to deal with the pursuing outages.

When Kibana 4.0 was created back in 2015, it only had three apps: Dashboard, Visualize, and Discover. Fast forward five years, Kibana now consists of 100+ plugins, millions of lines of code, thousands of dependencies, and dozens of frameworks. The architecture of Kibana that worked well with three apps had become a bottleneck that was hindering Kibana’s stability, scalability, performance, and development velocity.

We’re excited to share more details today about a long-running project that the Kibana team has been working on for the past couple of years: the Kibana development platform.

We all know that Prometheus is a popular system for collecting and querying metrics, especially in the cloud native world of Kubernetes and ephemeral instances. But people forget that Java has been running enterprise software since 1995, while Prometheus is a relative newcomer to the scene. It was only created in 2012! Even though Java has had its own metric collectors since before Prometheus was born, none of our new environments speak its (metric) language. How can you bridge that gap?

There are a lot of great things about Grafana 7.0, but one of my favorite features is the new React-based plugin platform, which has a set of new APIs and design system to help you build your own plugin. The process is easier and faster than ever. In this blog post, I’ll show how you can create a panel plugin for visualizing scatter plots. A scatter plot is a type of graph that displays values for (usually) two variables as a set of points along a horizontal and vertical axis.