Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Jaeger primarily supports two backends: Cassandra and Elasticsearch. Here at Grafana Labs we use Scylla, an open source Cassandra-compatible backend. In this post we’ll look at how we run Scylla at scale and share some techniques to reduce load while ingesting even more spans. We’ll also share some internal metrics about Jaeger load and Scylla backend performance. Special thanks to the Scylla team for spending some time with us to talk about performance and configuration!

Cortex is a long-term distributed storage for Prometheus. It provides horizontal scalability, high availability, multi-tenancy and blazing fast query performances when querying high cardinality series or large time ranges. Today, there are massive Cortex clusters storing tens to hundreds of millions of active series with a 99.5 percentile query latency below 2.5s.

At Grafana Labs, we’re big fans of putting ourselves in the shoes of our customers. So when it comes to building a product, dogfooding is a term we throw around constantly. In short, what it means is that we actually use the products we create throughout their entire life cycle. And I really mean the whole life cycle.

At the recent PromCon Online, I gave a review of developments in the space of the Prometheus storage engine, TSDB. In this blog post I am going to recap a bit of the talk and add more insights into what these developments will enable us to do in the future. While the talk contained some of the near-future features, I will be diving even further ahead. You can watch the talk here.

During PromCon, I gave a talk titled “The Future of Prometheus and its Ecosystem.” I want to share the key highlights with you.

It’s been a while, but the Kelly and Regis of Grafana Labs (a.k.a. Christine and Eldin of Solutions Engineering) are back to report on another Grafana Enterprise plugin: New Relic! The latest version of this plugin will be just one of the many topics we’ll cover during today’s webinar, All about Grafana plugins: Visualizing disparate data sources in one place. We’ll be hosting a great conversation around plugin updates, use cases, and the best way to make coffee.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is the fully managed Kubernetes service on AWS. If you’re using it and wondering how to query all your logs in one place, Loki is the answer. With this tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up Promtail on EKS to get full visibility into your cluster logs while using Grafana. We’ll start by forwarding pods logs then nodes services and finally Kubernetes events.

The 7.1 stable release builds on the major developments in Grafana 7.0. Here are some features we’re excited about in Grafana 7.1.

Cortex and Thanos are two brilliant solutions to scale out Prometheus, and many companies are now running them in production at scale. These two projects, both in the CNCF Sandbox, initially started with different technical approaches and philosophies: Cortex has been designed for scalability and high performances since day zero, while Thanos was originally focused on operational simplicity and cost-effectiveness.

Kristian Zhelyazkov is a developer at SAP working on Gardener, the SAP-driven Kubernetes-as-a-service open source project. In this guest blog post, he explains why the project is moving its logging stack to Loki.