At Grafana Labs we believe in shipping features early and often, and in recent years we’ve doubled down on that philosophy. We no longer wait for the yearly major release to give you access to the next big thing. Instead, we regularly make new features, bug fixes, and security patches available to our self-managing users (Grafana OSS and Grafana Enterprise) throughout the year.

We're excited to share a small but mighty new feature. Our Text tile now supports Markdown! This allows you to include rich content on your dashboards such as headings, links, lists, images and more. At SquaredUp we know that a useful dashboard is more than just a few charts. With this update you can now provide key context to the data on a dashboard to help tell the right story. For example you might want to: You can easily do all that now, and more.

At its core, observability is about helping humans understand and optimize complex systems. It enables engineering teams to ask questions on the fly, and to learn not only when something goes wrong but why. Observability also allows organizations to proactively identify and address performance issues — before their end users even have a chance to notice.

As a Senior Product Manager here at SquaredUp, I’d like to tell you more about how easy it is to share dashboards with anyone, as well as share some design decisions and explain the feature in more detail.

At Grafana Labs, our No. 1 approach when building AI/ML tools is to enable humans (a.k.a. all of us!) to understand complex systems. In other words, we want to make observability still human, but less complicated. (Our second use case? Making social media more fun.) We believe that AI/ML tools in observability should work towards minimizing toil and the need for everyone in your organization to have the same deep domain knowledge about your increasingly complex stack.

Denis Gontcharov is a data consultant who helps aluminum smelters break down data barriers. For the past five years, he has supported the aluminum industry with IT and data services as an independent consultant. Denis also works as a Developer Advocate at the United Manufacturing Hub. Jeremy Theocharis is co-founder and CTO at United Manufacturing Hub. He is an expert in industrial IoT with over seven years of experience leading large-scale IIoT projects in various industries.

A vital aspect of working in IT is that you need to effectively monitor a broad range of KPIs and metrics to ensure the smooth operation of your IT infrastructure. IT dashboards streamline this process as they are specialized dashboards designed to offer insights and track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to numerous aspects of IT operations and infrastructure.

In previous roles I have been both an Engineering Manager responsible for a team, and a Program Manager responsible for branching strategy and process around CICD pipelines. In both of those roles (but for very different reasons), my product's build quality has been critical to product success. The obvious "why" to this is no builds, no product, but the real why is much more nuanced.

I first started my career in IT support back in 2003 when VMs where something that was “coming” rather than mainstream, so I had the privilege of witnessing the birth of VMs first hand when my company made the switch from bare metal to VMware GSX running on top of Windows Server 2003.