Working with technology means dealing with incidents or outages from time-to-time, so staying on top of problems is essential. Back in the spring of 2022, Clearco, the world’s largest e-commerce investor, had an alerting system set up to catch issues, except they had one problem: Clearco’s Customer Success team would learn of a problem before a notification even went off.
I lead the Grafana Loki project here at Grafana Labs, and I’ve always loved building things professionally and in my personal life, whether we’re talking about metalworking or coding — or, more recently, 3D printing. A couple years ago, I purchased my first 3D printer, a Prusa i3 MK3S+. I use it periodically to build functional items I use around my house in Upstate New York. For example, I recently decided to build a solar radiation shield for my outdoor weather station.
OpenSearch dashboards are a powerful tool for visualising and exploring data stored in an OpenSearch-compatible data store such as Elasticsearch. With OpenSearch's intuitive interface and advanced analytical tools, this visualisation tool makes it easy to gain insights into your data and monitor and alert upon key metrics. Throughout this article, we'll look at some of the most impressive OpenSearch dashboard examples that showcase it’s capabilities and versatility.
With k6 Cloud, Grafana Labs is in the business of generating load — lots of load, distributed across a cluster of computers. So while our customers care about the systems they load, we care that our system can generate the load that they need and process the test metrics for them in an intuitive, explorable way.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) - or more specifically Machine Learning (ML) - and automation were big topics for many of our customers in 2022. Common reasons for the interest in AI and automation were to: increase efficiency, reduce manual processing, minimise human error and - especially for the use of ML - identify ‘unknown unknowns’.
Customers choose Embrace to help mobile development teams build fantastic mobile app experiences. Embrace provides best-in-class mobile insights that help users prioritize, understand, and resolve issues. All of which leads to better development decisions. But in modern software engineering, no team exists in a vacuum.
Grafana Faro and xk6-browser are both new tools within the Grafana Labs open source ecosystem, but the pairing is already showing a lot of potential in terms of frontend monitoring and performance testing. Faro, which was announced last November, includes a highly configurable SDK that instruments web apps to capture observability signals that can then be correlated with backend and infrastructure data.
I’ve always been wary about vendor events. In my experience, many of them are mostly marketing pitches, with little or no content that is applicable to my use cases. Despite that, last year I decided to convince my manager to let me attend ObservabilityCON 2022 to see what I could learn from it. My hope was that I would be able to get practical knowledge that could be applied as soon as I got back to work. (Spoiler alert: I did!)
Flaky tests are a problem that are found in almost every codebase. By definition, a flaky test is a test that both succeeds and fails without any changes to the code. For example, a flaky test may pass when someone runs it locally, but then fails on continuous integration (CI). Another example is that a flaky test may pass on CI, but when someone pushes a commit that hasn’t touched anything related to the flaky test, the test then fails.
