It’s monitoring time. We all collect metrics from our system and applications to monitor their health, availability and performance. Our metrics are essentially time-series data collected from various endpoints. Then, it is stored in time series specialized databases, and then visualized in the metrics graphs we all know and love.

Application teams must understand what their customer experience is like. This is true not only from a general perspective (in terms of usability and responsiveness) but also on a day-to-day, minute-by-minute basis. In particular, when you work with distributed systems, errors are inevitable. Site traffic fluctuates throughout the day, and any one of a system’s dependencies could also encounter an issue at any time.

Hello, I’m Callum. I work on Grafana Loki, including the hosted Grafana Cloud Logs offering. Grafana Loki is a distributed multi-tenant system for storing log data — ingestion, querying, all that fun stuff. It also powers Grafana Cloud Logs.

Managing on-call schedules and escalation chains, especially across many teams, can get cumbersome and error prone. This can be especially difficult without as-code workflows. Here on the Grafana OnCall team, we’re focused on making Grafana OnCall as easy to use as possible. We want to make it easier to reduce errors with your on-call schedules, create schedule and escalation templates quickly, and fit on-call management into your existing as-code patterns.

Someone once described dashboards to me as “expensive TV for software engineers.” At first, I stood there quietly shocked—dashboards had informed many root cause analyses (RCAs) in my life as a developer.

PromQL is a flexible language designed to make it easy for users to perform ad-hoc queries against their data. By default, Prometheus indexes all of the fields in each metric except for source and target, which are not indexed by default. Prometheus is an open-source tool that lets you monitor Kubernetes clusters and applications. It collects data from monitoring targets by scraping metrics HTTP endpoints.

We are happy to announce that file provisioning for Grafana Alerting has arrived in Grafana 9.1. This feature enables you to configure your whole alerting stack using files on disk, as you may already do with data sources or dashboards. The Terraform Grafana provider has also been updated to allow the provisioning of Grafana Alerting resources.

With the Grafana 8.5 release, we introduced the concept of service accounts. Now with the Grafana 9.1 release, we’re making service accounts generally available. This is a project that came out of technical necessity, but it has given us the opportunity to reflect on API tokens and machine-to-machine interaction across Grafana Labs.