Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We introduced Grafana Alloy last year in an effort to create the best possible open source “big tent” telemetry collector. A continuation of our work on Grafana Agent Flow, we designed Alloy to simplify observability at scale and to easily integrate with the OpenTelemetry and Prometheus ecosystems. We’ve seen lots of interest since Alloy was announced at GrafanaCON 2024, and industry observers are taking notice, too.

Both Kibana and Grafana are data visualization tools providing users capabilities to explore, analyze and visualize data with dashboards. The difference between Kibana and Grafana lies in their genesis. Kibana was built on top of the Elasticsearch stack, famous for log analysis and management. In comparison, Grafana was created mainly for metrics monitoring supporting visualization for time-series databases.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is famous for operating the world’s largest particle accelerator, but did you know that CERN is also at the heart of the world’s largest computing grid? And with such unprecedented computing demands comes some serious observability needs.

Like the fit your friend got on ASOS? There’s a good chance Grafana Cloud had something to do with that. Each year, more than 20 million customers come to the UK-based online retailer to fill their digital carts, and they expect a seamless online experience as they shop and check out. ASOS can consistently provide that with the help of Grafana Cloud. “There are alerts set up for many of our customer-facing journeys,” said Dylan Morley, Lead Principal Engineer at ASOS.

This article is part of a series on setting up an end-to-end monitoring and alerting stack using Prometheus. Continuing our series on setting Prometheus in a Docker container, we will add a Grafana instance to our Prometheus setup. Please refer to the previous article where we use docker compose to run Prometheus and Alertmanager together as that forms the basis to run multiple related containers. We will add a container to run Grafana to the same compose file in this article.

Visuals often communicate better than words, and this is also true for monitoring systems. Dashboards are an essential feature in log monitoring systems, providing great value to those who need to analyze and monitor logs. They help centralize log data in a simple, easy-to-read format, avoid clutter, and allow the team to focus on critical metrics.

FinOps dashboards help manage cloud financial operations by providing real-time visibility into cloud spending, resource utilization, and cost optimization. They are part of the broader FinOps framework, which combines finance and DevOps practices to improve collaboration between technology, finance, and business teams. This collaboration supports financial accountability and optimizes cloud costs.