Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It’s summertime in the Northern Hemisphere, and for many people that means it’s also travel season. But before you depart for your dream holiday, don’t forget the essentials: passport, suitcase, and … Grafana? That’s right. If you’re headed to a different country, odds are you’ll use a different currency when you get there. And you can use Grafana to track changes in the exchange rates so you can get the most bang for your buck.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of dashboard variables in SquaredUp. With this new feature, dashboards you create are flexible and reusable. Instead of hardcoding specific objects within the tiles on a dashboard, you can use variables to create just one dashboard to be reused across all your objects of the same type – be it your pipelines, apps, or microservices. Viewers of the dashboard can then select which objects they are interested in on the fly.

In this blog, I wanted to take a deep-dive into our Notifications feature and explain some of the product design decisions we made. Notifications is one of the most frequently used features of SquaredUp. We designed this feature to be quick and easy to set up, with a primary focus on delivering timely notifications to the appropriate audience.

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.