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Grafana 8.4 release: new panels, better query caching, increased security, accessibility features, and more!

Grafana 8.4 is here! Get 8.4 This release includes a variety of updates focused on making Grafana easier to use, improving performance, and keeping your data secure. For a full list of new features and capabilities, check out our What’s New in Grafana 8.4 documentation. 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.

Introducing Grafana k6 Cloud for Education, a free program to help teach performance testing

Grafana k6 is our open source tool to help you ship reliable applications by doing performance testing in a modern and developer-friendly way. Performance testing is still unknown to many, but it is not a new topic. In fact, performance testing courses are everywhere — even at colleges and universities. One of our passions is to educate others on the best practices of performance testing, working together with the Grafana k6 community.

What are cardinality spikes and why do they matter?

At Grafana Labs, we spend a lot of time talking to our customers, and something we’ve heard from people in a wide range of organizations is that they want to be able to better manage sudden spikes in cardinality. Here we will give you a basic overview of what cardinality is and why it’s an important factor in your observability setup, especially when there is a dramatic uptick.

Learn how to get started with Grafana Cloud, Grafana OnCall, Grafana Tempo, and the Grafana Stack

Are your metrics, logs, and traces playing hard to get in your current observability setup? Feel like your on-call messages are left on read? Is the heatmap between your data sources fizzling out on your dashboard?

Transforming application logs into metrics with Istio and Grafana Cloud

Do you actually know what your customers are looking for? A way to uncover new business opportunities is to analyze your system, collect what you really need, and visualize it through a comprehensive graph! Log traces are a great place to start because they usually contain useful information on your customers' interests. You just need to transform them.

Bootstrapping a cloud native multi-data center observability stack

Bram Vogelaar is a DevOps Cloud Engineer at The Factory, and he recently delivered an intro to observability talk during our Grafana Labs' EMEA meetup. When I talk to customers, they might tell me about how their applications are running in two data centers, but when we probe a little further, it turns out that their observability stack is only available in one of them. This revelation hit close to home last March.

Real-time drone tracking and management with Grafana

The number of internet-connected assets around us that are powering services and utilities in a wide array of sectors is rising at an exponential rate. As a result, it’s becoming critical for businesses that provide such services and utilities to have an observability stack tailored to the type of physical hardware devices that are generally deployed in swarms.

Going off-label with Grafana Loki: How to set up a low-cost Twitter analysis

The term “off-label” is used to describe when a product is being used successfully for something other than its intended purpose. It’s a quite common occurrence in the pharmaceutical industry, but it can also happen in the world of software. Grafana Loki was written as — and is marketed as — a simple, Prometheus-friendly logging backend with a very low total cost of ownership.

A look at how the U.S. Department of Defense deploys the Grafana stack

In September 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Iron Bank formally authorized Grafana, Grafana Enterprise, and Grafana Loki, allowing the 100,000 employees and contractors who work on DoD software, both classified and unclassified, to easily select and immediately deploy Grafana Labs software without additional approvals and security certifications. In our first-ever government session at ObservabilityCon 2021, former U.S.

Pro tip: How to use semi-relative time ranges in Grafana

If you’re even the slightest bit familiar with how Grafana dashboards work, you’ve probably realized that the time range selector is one of the most important features. After all, when you’re using Grafana to visualize time series and logs, defining a time range is required for metrics and logs queries.