We are excited to announce the release of Grafana 8.1. This release builds upon our promise of a composable, open observability platform with new visualizations and dynamic panel configuration options while extending the functionality we launched in Grafana 8.0. Get 8.1 You can get started with Grafana in minutes with Grafana Cloud. We have free and paid Grafana Cloud plans to suit every use case — sign up for free now. And now, on to the highlights for 8.1.

We recently heard that a customer, a power user of Prometheus, was grappling with 18,000 individual rules for its metrics, because its setup involved creating an individual rule group for each generated metric. Surely there was a better, more efficient way to handle this scale of metrics? In fact, we did come up with a solution, and this blog post will walk you through how you might benefit from it too.

Back in February, we introduced Grafana Enterprise Logs (GEL) into the Grafana Enterprise Stack. GEL is a new way for large organizations to ingest and query their full log volume, without the cost or operational complexity associated with other solutions. (View a demo here.) We just released GEL 1.1, and one of its key features is label-based access control (LBAC).

Qiao Han is a Software Engineer at BasisAI and co-author of Boxkite. He is interested in everything related to observability and has contributed to popular open source projects like libcurl and aiohttp. This post is written together with his coworker Linh Nguyen, who is a Tech Lead at BasisAI.

Back in March, we announced that Grafana Labs was partnering with Elastic to build an official Elasticsearch plugin for Grafana. As our CEO Raj Dutt wrote at the time, our “big tent” philosophy “means that we want to support data sources that our users are passionate about. Elasticsearch is one of the most popular data platforms that can be visualized in Grafana.”

At Grafana Labs, we are proud to be one of the largest code contributors to Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects. We are currently the leading company contributor to Prometheus, and also make substantial contributions to Cortex, Thanos, Jaeger, and OpenTelemetry. Our own open source projects — Grafana, Grafana Loki, and Grafana Tempo — have also become fundamental parts of the cloud native ecosystem.

GitHub, GitLab, Jira, and ServiceNow are some of the most popular software development tools out there, and Grafana has powerful integrations with each of them. Join us for a live webinar on July 29 at 9:30 PT / 12:30 ET / 16:30 UTC for a demo of these data source plugins and best practices for creating a single pane of glass for viewing your software operations metrics. You can register here.

We are happy to announce that the Kafka integration is available for Grafana Cloud, our composable observability platform bringing together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. Apache Kafka is an open source distributed event streaming platform that provides high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.

“SLO is a favorite word of SREs,” Grafana Labs Principal Software Engineer Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein said during his talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2019. “Of course, it’s also great for design decisions, to set the right goals, and to set alerting in the right way. It’s everything that is good.” So what happens when things go bad?

As we look to the future of Grafana Labs and our products, we are keen to expand the ways in which we can help engineering teams build, maintain, and operate great software. We believe we can only achieve this by paying careful attention to the developer experience and the challenges faced in the real world of engineering.