The goal of Grafana has always been to help people feel in control of their observability infrastructure. Users come in with an alert; that takes them to a dashboard; they use ad hoc querying; and then they use log aggregation or distributed tracing to come up with a fix that will resolve an incident or issue.
With the recent release of Grafana 6.3 substantial refactoring and improvements to plugins, external auth systems, and permissions have been introduced in Grafana Enterprise. Let’s take a look at some of the latest Enterprise features here.
For a lot of DevOps engineers and SREs, a Grafana dashboard is often the beginning of a troubleshooting procedure. It might be an alert in Slack or a colleague pointing out anomalous system behavior. Or maybe it’s just part of your day-to-day monitoring workflow. Whatever the reason, staring at a beautiful Grafana dashboard is the starting point of what can be either a long and excruciating process, or a short and efficient one.
We are building Grafana Labs to be a sustainable open source company. In addition to maintaining the open source project and community around Grafana, we offer paid products that help make that possible. Grafana Enterprise was introduced over a year ago and adds features needed by enterprise-level organizations. In this blog post we’ll discuss some of those features and how we decide what goes into Grafana Enterprise.
Before Grafana, there was Kibana 3. Kibana was revolutionary when it came out, because it allowed you to use Elasticsearch in a very new way, for log analytics and not just normal document search, and to build dashboards without writing JSON documents. It had this nice UI, which let you drag panels around. But editing panels was a little tricky; you could only edit them in this sort of fullscreen modal. Still, it was really good for its time.
Today we are releasing Grafana 5.4.5 and 6.3.4. These patch releases include an important security fix that affects all Grafana versions between 2.0.0 and 6.3.3.
Yesterday, we announced the Wavefront Enhanced Enterprise Dashboarding UX. This major revamp of the Wavefront dashboard and chart building capabilities started with a single goal: make observability in Wavefront even easier and more intuitive, for novice users. To make dashboard customization easier, we focused on speed. With our new UI, you can create a dashboard in just a few clicks. You’ll spend less time tinkering and more time extracting insights from your data.
We created Teamwork Projects with one goal in mind: to help our users become more efficient, productive and organized. We’re all about helping you to manage the big picture, and zoom in on the details when you need to. And to help you take that to the next level, we’ve redefined what a dashboard is in Teamwork Projects.
At Grafana Labs, we constantly look for new opportunities to enhance workflows for our users. Our mission is for Grafana to be the missing piece in your system and a link between the three pillars of observability. No matter what your observability stack is composed of, we want Grafana to be the answer for bridging the gaps between metrics, logs, and traces.
Dashboards—they’re the face of your analysis, the interface of your business. They help you organize and visualize your data and most importantly customize how you present intelligence to different stakeholders. They reveal valuable insights at a glance, keep you informed, and can chart your next steps to success. They ultimately serve the purpose of keeping everyone in the organization on the same page.
