Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Metrics are the cornerstone of an observable system – they tell you a system’s measured outputs, granting visibility into what your customers are experiencing and when there’s a problem. However, not all methods for recording and saving metrics from a system’s output are alike. The best method for shipping your system’s metrics to Grafana Cloud depends on many factors, varying from the source of your metrics data to your familiarity with observability tools.

Here at Grafana Labs, we’re always striving to reduce the amount of effort needed to maintain plugins across different versions of Grafana. That is why we’re excited to provide you with a tool to check the compatibility of your plugin with the latest Grafana plugins API. We know that it can be frustrating for developers to find out people can’t use their plugins. Over the past few months, we’ve been working on detecting the breaking changes as soon as they happen.

We are thrilled to announce that Grafana Incident is now generally available to all Grafana Cloud users, including our generous free tier. (You can sign up for a free Grafana Cloud account now.)

How many Marvel movies’ worth of Internet traffic do 28,000 conference goers create during a five-day Cisco Live event? There’s a Grafana dashboard for that. Cisco Live is the network industry’s largest annual event, delivering education and inspiration to technology innovators worldwide with a week’s worth of programming keynotes, product announcements, entertainment, and more.

You may be asking yourself: What exactly is Podman? Podman is short for Pod Manager and is a daemonless, open source container engine alternative to Docker that allows for rootless containers. Podman is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems. It only requires a simple and easy install on RPM-based Linuxes, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Rocky, or AlmaLinux.

Traditionally the Prometheus TSDB only accepts in-order samples that are less than one hour old, discarding everything else. Having this requirement has allowed Prometheus to be extremely efficient with how it stores samples. And in practice, it really hasn’t really been much of a limitation for users because of the pull-based model in Prometheus, which scrapes data at a regular cadence off of the targets being observed. Several use cases, however, need out-of-order support.

Houzz is where millions of homeowners and home improvement professionals go to seek inspiration and supplies for their remodeling projects. But to continue as the leading platform for home remodeling and design, the Houzz tech stack needed a renovation of its own as the company scaled. In response, the Houzz team began by revamping their monoliths into microservices.

More than 20,000 companies around the world use Ansible as their Infrastructure as Code and configuration management tool. With the rising popularity towards managing infrastructure using IaC and config management tools, Ansible is one of the best open source tools to choose from. That is why we are excited to announce a new Grafana Ansible collection available to all Grafana Cloud users, including those in the generous free tier.