Greetings! This is Mike reporting from the Solutions Engineering team at Grafana Labs. In previous posts, you might have read our beginner’s guide to distributed tracing and how it can help to increase your application’s performance. In this post, we are back to talk about metrics and showcase another one of our newest favorite Enterprise plugins: Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring (formerly known as SignalFx)!

In my prior three blog posts, we set some ground rules, looked at some out-of-box dashboards, overloaded an in-box property, and finally created an innovative structure to communicate status using SquaredUp's EAM feature. Looking back, when I started this blog, I explicitly stated that traditional monitoring wasn't our goal. It's essential, but the industry (in broad terms) hasn't been successful with monitoring when the only focus is on the infrastructure perspective.

Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get what you need for observability: Prometheus and Graphite for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for tracing, all integrated within Grafana and managed by the Grafana Labs team. You can go from zero to beautiful graphs, insightful logs, and preconfigured alerts in minutes. Built with modern distributed systems techniques, Grafana Cloud allows you to grow with your applications and infrastructure and easily scale past 100M+ metrics.

Datadog dashboards provide a foundation for monitoring and troubleshooting your infrastructure and applications, and template variables allow you to focus your dashboards on a particular subset of hosts, containers, or services based on tags or facets. We’re pleased to announce template variable associated values, which can help you speed up your troubleshooting by dynamically presenting the most relevant values for your template variables.

In my prior two blog posts, we focused on creating a bunch of Enterprise Applications (EAs), tagging those EAs, and then updating the Status dashboard to only show those EAs that are Critical Service Offerings (CSO). For this blog post, we will create some relationships and demonstrate how alerting behaves using SquaredUp's Manual Reporting Availability functionality available in the EAM tier of the product. For this post, we're going to do amazing stuff!