Dashboards

Grafana Mimir is an open source distributed time series database. Publicly launched in March 2022, Mimir has been designed for storing and querying metrics at any scale. Highly available, highly performant, and cost-effective, Mimir is the underlying system powering Grafana Cloud Metrics, and it’s used by a growing open source community that includes individual users, small start-up companies, and large enterprises like OVHcloud.

DORA metrics, not to be confused with the beloved children’s cartoon character, are a bit trendy at the moment in the world of technology. The DevOps Research and Assessment group (DORA) is run out of Google. They run surveys and do research into what makes organizations successful in the Digital Age. They’re probably most well known for their yearly State of DevOps Reports and the book Accelerate.

Today I want to talk about metric queries. More specifically, I want to talk about an important concept that is going to make your queries run faster, give you more accurate results, and make your Grafana Loki operators (like me) much happier. A metric query in Loki looks like this: And the part I want to talk about is that at the end. Now, if you’re like me and have a short attention span and are already bored — I understand.

The Grafana Labs ecosystem is built on a range of different projects that incorporate logs, metrics, traces across load testing, and Kubernetes monitoring. I’ll assume you know all of that data (and more!) can be visualized in Grafana. What made my observability dream become reality, though, is how these systems can work together to help you effectively debug performance issues and operate your system with more confidence.

“So you get paged and wake up in the middle of the night, you don’t know what’s going on, and there you are needing to figure things out — What kind of tabs do I need open? Where do I find the logs? Where are the dashboards and the metrics?” If you’ve ever been on call, this refrain, voiced by Alexander Rösel, Senior Software Engineer at Ultimate, will sound all too familiar.

As more people and organizations adopt Prometheus and Grafana for observability, we at Grafana Labs want to make it easier for this expanding pool of users to answer questions about their systems, regardless of whether they’re experts or novices. That’s why we’re adding a feature to enhance metric browsing in the Prometheus query builder in addition to the metric select.

With every major release of Grafana, we strive to give our users a broader, more powerful and more streamlined set of features for data visualization. Grafana 10, unveiled this month at GrafanaCON 2023, is certainly no exception. From more intuitive navigation to updated plugin development tools, Grafana 10 enhancements benefit new and seasoned users alike.

Grafana dashboards enable millions of users to visualize and analyze their data. And working behind the scenes of the widely used open source platform is React, a frontend JavaScript library for building user interfaces. In this post — which was inspired by my recent presentation at React Summit 2023 in Amsterdam — we’ll explore why we chose to use React for Grafana, and the benefits and challenges we’ve seen along the way.