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.
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.
Performance is one of those things that most people will agree is super important, but nevertheless tends to get overlooked. In light of that, I wanted to share the approach we recently took with auditing the Grafana product’s performance, and how we went about trying to improve it.
“Nines don’t matter when users aren’t happy” is something you may have heard a time or two from folks here at Honeycomb. We often emphasize the fact that while your system can look healthy at a high level, deep down something is likely broken in ways that cause pain for users. If you are empowered to ask detailed questions about your services, you can find and understand these problems more easily.
As your environment grows in scale and complexity, finding faster ways to build rich dashboards and share strategic insights with the right team members becomes more important. To help you easily share data with anyone, anywhere, we are happy to announce that you can now copy and paste widgets within Datadog (across dashboards, Notebooks, and accounts)—and even in emails and other communication channels like Slack.
