Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Numbers don’t lie — and the data shows that in a year in which we, once again, endured unpredictable changes, Grafana experienced unparalleled success. In June, we introduced Grafana 8.0, which included unified alerting, new visualizations, real-time streaming, and more. Since then we have introduced a host of new features as well as new data source plugins that only reinforce Grafana’s commitment to our “big tent” philosophy.

The Log4J library is one of the most widely-used logging libraries for Java code. On the 24th of November 2021, Alibaba’s Cloud Security Team found a vulnerability in the Log4J, also known as log4shell, framework that provides attackers with a simple way to run arbitrary code on any machine that uses a vulnerable version of the Log4J. This vulnerability was publicly disclosed on the 9th of December 2021.

2021 brought us widespread COVID vaccines, the Great Resignation, global supply chain disruption, inflation that went from transitory to persistent, accelerated digital transformation in the wake of the pandemic, an attempt at a return to normalcy—and the office—and plenty of uncertainty for the year ahead, thanks to the Delta and Omicron variants.

There is no doubt about it that the events of 2020 triggered a huge surge in the use of unified communication products. In the consumer space, everyone and their grandmother became familiar with Zoom; in the enterprise space though, many took advantage of their Microsoft licensing to leverage Teams meetings and calls as a primary communication mechanism. This, in turn, has focused a lot more attention for system administrators on how to monitor Microsoft 365 (O365) and Teams in particular.

Customer satisfaction is about meeting customer expectations, customer delight is about exceeding them. Building customer delight into your product means going above and beyond simple customer satisfaction in ways that build a long-term emotional connection and loyalty towards your company. And customer delight matters.

Here’s a look back at the releases, products, community stories, and major announcements that defined another incredible year for Grafana Labs.

You place your mug on your desk and boot your computer. Like every morning, you skim over various dashboards on one screen and sift through your email alerts on the other before you start pulling the regular reports. But this morning turns out to be nothing like other mornings. It is about to take a mean twist that will keep you from ever finishing your morning coffee.

Ooh, good question! My favorite thing about this part of the year is that work slows down, everybody is on vacation, and those of us not traveling get to work on little projects that we’re too busy to touch most of the year. As Martin Thwaites put it: “The Product Owners are away, the devs will play.” For Martin, this year, “play” means adding tracing to more of their services.

The following is an analysis of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) incident on 12/22/2021. When it comes to major AWS outages, three times is certainly not the charm. For the third time in three weeks, the public cloud giant reported an outage, this time due to a power outage “within a single data center within a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the U.S.-EAST-1 Region," according to the AWS status page. Here at Catchpoint, we first observed issues at 07:11 a.m.

It’s an exciting time here at Kentik. We’re expanding into new markets, working closely with amazing customers, and continuing to hire talented people to grow our team. We announced a new round of funding in the fall. We’re continuously building on our product. And we have our sights set on scaling our systems to large numbers. As Kentik’s backend engineering manager, I know this has kept our team very busy.