Sure, thousands of technologists around the world are using Prometheus and Grafana to monitor their business systems. But how about putting these technologies to work at home? Erwin de Keijzer, a Linux engineer at the Dutch consulting firm Snow, gave a talk at GrafanaCon EU about how he used Prometheus and Grafana to monitor the power usage… of his washing machine. “This is a talk that’s a bit different scale than we’ve heard so far” at GrafanaCon, he quipped.

All Things Open, a conference focused on open source technologies, was held in Raleigh, NC this week and was bursting at the seams with over 4,500 attendees. Grafana Labs’ own Tom Wilkie gave his RED Method: How to instrument your services talk to a standing-room only crowd. We were excited to speak at and sponsor ATO and look forward to next year.

This week we’ll learn about the new Google Stackdriver core datasource in Grafana, dive into the new Postgres query editor and share some best practices.

Grafana v5.3 comes with a new visual query editor for the PostgreSQL datasource. The query editor makes it easier for users to explore time-series data by improving the discoverability of data stored in PostgreSQL. Users can use drop-down menus to formulate their queries with valid selections and macros to express time-series specific functionalities, all without a deep knowledge of the database schema or the SQL language.

This week the Grafana Labs team was busy prepping for the Grafana v5.3 stable release! Grafana v5.3 adds Stackdriver as a core datasource, a new graphical query editor for Postgres, enhancements to TV and kiosk mode, and a lot more. See the release section for a list of all the new features.

Grafana v5.3 brings new features, many enhancements and bug fixes. This article will detail the major new features and enhancements.

This week we released Grafana 5.3.0beta-3 in prep for a stable release that should be available next week. In addition to details on the new beta, we have a lot of new and updated plugins to share, and our weekly roundup of Grafana-related articles from around the Internet.

Big news this week - GrafanaCon early bird tickets are now on sale! We’ve released a limited number of early bird tickets, so grab yours before they’re sold out. Also, call for proposals is open until October 15, so don’t wait until the last minute to submit your talk. We’ve gotten some great proposals already, but the more the merrier. Keep an eye out at grafanacon.org for more updates.

This week we share articles covering Grafana’s alpha Explore UI, the many ways Logicify uses Grafana, building your own centralized monitoring stack, and more.

When there’s an incident, Grafana is often the starting point for figuring out a response. Users look at a time series panel and form a hypothesis. And in many situations, they’d like to dive deeper. To help make that easier, Grafana Labs has created the Explore UI, which allows you to iterate quickly through Prometheus queries, while leaving your dashboards intact.