We all like a pretty dashboard. For us data nerds, there’s something extremely enticing about the colors and graphs depicting our environment in real-time. But while Kibana and Grafana bask in glory, there is a lot of heavy lifting being done behind the scenes to actually collect the data.

With businesses collecting millions of metrics, let’s look at how they can efficiently scale and deal with these amounts. As covered in the previous article (A Spike in Sales Is Not Always Good News), analyzing millions of metrics for changes may result in alert storms, notifying users about EVERY change, not just the most significant ones. To bring order to this situation, Anodot groups correlated anomalies together, in a unified alert.

The recent 5.1 release focused on smoothing out the rough edges from the 5.0 release. The major highlights of the Grafana 5.2 release are these two much-requested, long-awaited features.

With millions of downloads for its various components since first being introduced, the ELK Stack is the world’s most popular log management platform. In contrast, Splunk — the historical leader in the space — self-reports 15,000 customers total. But what exactly is ELK, and why is the software stack seeing such widespread interest and adoption? Let’s take a deeper dive.

Kibana 6.3 was released a few weeks ago, together with new versions of Elasticsearch, Logstash and Beats, and despite the fact that this was not a major release, the new capabilities included in this version definitely deserve a close look.

We’re all collectively trying to define observability (“o11y,” pronounced “olly”) these days, and, as Honeycomb is sometimes described as an event-based observability product, trying to define all the other words that go around o11y at the same time.

TimeShift is turning 1 year old! I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading these weekly roundups as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. This week we have news on the new Grafana v5.2.0-beta3 release, a bunch of plugin updates to share, and your regular dose of recent blog posts.

A water and energy innovation company founded in 2005, Natel Energy builds hydropower turbines and designs resilient and distributed hydropower systems. In his talk at GrafanaCon EU, Natel Developer Ryan McKinley gave us a fascinating look at how the company is using Grafana to help run these next-generation power plants.

In our world of distributed systems, state changes to your infrastructure often take some time to propagate. With a few exceptions (for example, feature flags), single point in time changes are rare. Deploys, outages, database migrations, failovers, stress tests; none of these things are instantaneous – all have some duration during which the system is changing.