Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As the complexity of software systems explodes, so does the amount of data that gets generated by instrumenting these systems. This poses a problem for our users — especially those who are in charge of observability teams and observability platforms at large enterprises. They have to strike the right balance between cost management and giving teams the freedom to instrument whatever they want. Often observability leaders are supporting dozens of teams that are using hundreds of dashboards.

When Covid-19 hit Romania, it was difficult for ordinary citizens to get good information about the pandemic and its escalating impact on the country. The government, presiding over one of the least developed healthcare infrastructures in the European Union, was releasing bulletins via PDF and text that were neither timely nor all that accurate. Into the breach stepped a team of six volunteers—five economists and a data scientist—operating out of Babes-Bolyai University.

More than two years ago, the Google team began collaborating with Grafana Labs to build a data source plugin for Google Cloud Monitoring (then known as Stackdriver). Today, Grafana ships with built-in support for Google Cloud Monitoring, allowing users to add it as a data source and quickly get started building dashboards for Google Cloud Monitoring metrics. We’ve continued to make improvements on the plugin, and we’ll share in this blog post a few new features we’ve built.

What makes a manufacturing plant efficient? “Generally, it means that there’s no wasted materials, no wasted time, and no wasted energy,” said Grant Pinkos, President of American Metal Processing. “Unplanned downtime is minimal or nonexistent.

Grafana was made for large IT infrastructure projects, but a growing group of users rely on it for industrial/IoT projects, like monitoring physical equipment. And with good reason. According to Grafana Labs VP of Applications Ryan McKinley, “Software built by software engineers trying to know how their software is running is often nicer than industrial alternatives.” Some of the Grafana 8.0 updates were designed with industrial/IoT users in mind.

There’s something special about the interactions a train journey generates — the interesting views and perspectives that inspire insights and drive new thinking. Martin Klimmek, Head of Digital Development and Operations at Siemens Mobility and Haluk Tutuk, Data Platform Engineer with Periscube, are among 20 data scientists, data engineers, and DevOps engineers building the next generation of data-powered customer service for the rolling stock industry in the U.K. and beyond.

H-E-B is one of the largest grocery chains in the U.S. that works with roughly 137,000 partners to achieve more than $32 billion in sales each year. In the past decade, the 116-year-old, Texas-based grocer has undergone a digital transformation to reinvent and expand its business, offering services such as online bakery orders, curbside pick-up, and grocery delivery from its 420 stores.

Josh Chessman, Senior Analyst at Gartner, spoke at SquaredUp Live 2021 on the future of IT operations (IT Ops) monitoring and how monitoring teams need to change to get there. Here are some of the highlights from his talk.

The observability of metrics is a key factor for a successful operations team, allowing for increasingly effective visualizations, analysis, and troubleshooting. Google Cloud works with third-party partners, such as Grafana Labs, to make it easy for customers to create their desired observability stack leveraging a combination of different tools. More than two years ago, we collaborated with Grafana Labs to introduce the Cloud Monitoring plugin for Grafana.

From early on, Grafana has managed access control with three organizational permission levels (Viewer, Editor, and Admin) and one special global permission level of Grafana Admin. There are also configuration file options that can be globally applied to all users in an organization within an instance, as well as data source permissions and dashboard permissions.