Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Grafana Labs has had a long commitment to educating our customers and community about all of our open source technologies and products, with our community Slack, webinars, conferences, documentation, and of course, this blog. In 2021, we decided that it was time to create a formal education program to provide more structured, repeatable, and scalable learning experiences – all while providing the same compelling and quality content our community is accustomed to.

Grafana Tempo has had quite a year. Just eight months after it was announced at ObservabilityCON 2020, the open source tracing solution went GA. Since the Tempo team released v1.0 in June, we have ingested more than 39 trillion spans, a 26x increase from last year. We also introduced Grafana Enterprise Traces, which is powered by Tempo, to the Grafana Enterprise Stack.

This year, we were excited to deliver the easiest version of Grafana Loki to use yet. With Loki 2.4, the Loki team introduced a simple, scalable deployment, and over the past 12 months, we added lots of great new features. Not to mention, we launched Grafana Enterprise Logs, a new addition to the Grafana Enterprise Stack that’s powered by Loki. But none of this would have been possible without our active community: In 2021, Loki had 166 contributors and 823 PRs in GItHub.

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.

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

Ever known a project manager who thinks a task takes minutes when it really takes hours? One company has developed a helpful monitoring tool that not only helps project managers make more realistic estimates, but also helps product teams save time, increase efficiency, and improve their overall performance. At ObservabilityCON 2020, Walter Ritzel Paixão Côrtes, a product designer at Dell, gave a presentation about a data-driven solution his team developed called Product Team Observability.

On Dec. 8, we gathered the Grafana EMEA community for another dynamic meetup. Experts from the Grafana Labs and k6 teams alongside observability pros from different organizations covered topics ranging from shift left observability practices to monitoring your green thumb at home with Grafana. In case you missed the virtual get together, here’s a recap of each talk along with the session videos.

At re:Invent this year, AWS announced its new digital twin service, AWS IoT TwinMaker (in preview), which allows users to create digital twins of real-world systems like buildings, factories, industrial equipment, and production lines. Using a digital twin to monitor and improve operations for a physical system requires ingesting data from IoT sensors, process instruments, cameras, and enterprise systems, and curating and associating data from these disparate sources.

On Nov. 8, I started as the new Chief Information and Security Officer at Grafana Labs. In my first five weeks, I’ve met about 100 really amazing people; learned and absorbed early lessons about our workplace culture; kicked off working groups for our 2022 initiatives (bug bounty FTW); and contributed to tackling our first-ever 0day. Amid all of that, I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking.

In collaboration with the AWS team, we have recently released the new Redshift data source plugin for Grafana. Amazon Redshift is the fastest and most widely used cloud data warehouse. It uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes by using AWS-designed hardware and machine learning.