In 2022, we introduced Grafana Mimir, the most scalable and performant open source time series database in the world. And since its launch, we’ve been busy, increasing Mimir’s scale, making it easier to get started, and boosting query performance. But even with these advancements, we understand the challenges that can come with a self-hosted and self-managed OSS tool.

In the dynamic realm of observability frameworks, one name stands out as the unspoken gold standard with the ability to guide developers through the intricacies of monitoring and data collection. Let’s look at the heart of open-source technologies and uncover the essence of a tool that has become the industry's beacon of excellence.

Sentry was born and bred in the Open Source community, and we very much think of ourselves as part of it today. One thing we’ve learned together over the years is that an over-emphasis on user freedom can come at the cost of developer sustainability, to the point that we are now in an Open Source sustainability crisis.

Contributing to open source software helps you develop new skills, gain real-world coding experience, interact with new technologies, and meet new people. But with so many open source projects to choose from — developers started some 52 million new projects on GitHub in 2022 alone — it can be difficult to figure out which repositories to contribute to. If you’re thinking about joining a new open source project in 2024, you’ve come to the right place.

When looking at the broad landscape of IT automation tools, you’ll find dozens of tools that seem like viable solutions to your automation needs. Almost all of those tools can be broken down into two categories: Open source automation tools and commercial automation tools. (Open source automation tools with a commercial offering are still considered open source, even if the commercial version has a price tag.)

At Grafana Labs, open source has always been part of our DNA. But in 2023 — a year in which we reflected on 10 years of Grafana, among other major OSS milestones — the power of our open source community felt especially palpable.

Pi-hole is a fantastic open-source DNS-based ad blocker that enhances your online experience by blocking unwanted ads and trackers network-wide. Monitoring the performance and status of your Pi-hole setup is essential to ensure its effectiveness. Next, we'll explore how to use a Prometheus exporter to expose metrics from Pi-hole and have the OpenTelemetry collector scrape the metrics and send them to Splunk Observability Cloud.

My Top Five Takeaways from Aiven Live, by Florian Engel, Director of Customer & Content Marketing.

Five years ago today, Grafana Loki was introduced to the world on the KubeconNA 2018 stage when David Kaltschmidt, now a Senior Director of Engineering at Grafana Labs, clicked the button to make the Loki repo public live in front of the sold-out crowd. At the time, Loki was a prototype: We bolted together Grafana as a UI, Cortex internals, and Prometheus labels to find out if there was a need for a new open source tool to manage logs.