Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In Grafana, Loki isn’t just for log visualization anymore. Now there’s a simple way to use a Loki datasource as a metric datasource in your graphs. This used to require a hack to make it work – adding Loki as a Prometheus datasource – and the process was very tedious. But Grafana v6.6 integrates Loki even better than before. As a result, right out of the box you can create very nice dashboards about your logs, and mix them with your dashboards about metrics.

We recently needed to parse and modify some query strings while building Request Metrics. Query string parsing has never been pleasant in .NET, has it improved in .NET Core? We were familiar with HttpUtility.ParseQueryString() for the task, but that API has a major landmine. With the release of .NET Core, Microsoft took another swing at it. We figured we’d try the new way and see how they did! If you want the fully uncensored version, check out the video above.

It is widespread to have parent-child associations in Rails applications. On the parent side is a :has_many association, and on the child side is a :belongs_to association. Examples include an article with comments, or an author with books--the former is the parent, and the latter is the child. It is often useful to display a count of the children alongside information about the parent, without necessarily loading all the child records.

If you’ve followed our latest blog posts, you’ll have learned how to send metric data to Logz.io and visualize that data on Infrastructure Monitoring – our Grafana-based metrics monitoring solution that we made Generally Available on Monday. At this point you’ll have some nice looking Grafana dashboards in your account.

I wrote a quick script the other day to pull some SCOM Alert data for testing and thought I’d share a summarized version for anyone looking for easy options to extract their SCOM data. The below sample script pulls all of the SCOM Alerts from your Management Group and pushes them via REST to a specified endpoint. Using the Operations Manager module makes this pretty quick and painless. I’ve called out a couple of easy tweaks you can make below to the script itself.