Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At FOSDEM 2020, Grafana Labs software engineers Tom Braack and Malcolm Holmes explained how and why the team developed Tanka, a scalable Jsonnet-based tool for deploying and managing Kubernetes infrastructure. They also shared how Grafana Labs leverages the project to manage and monitor its own infrastructure as well as showcased how Tanka makes deploying a Grafana instance faster and more efficient.

You’re done setting up your first graph panels. You want to do more, look around the visualization settings, and discover the settings for the X and Y axes. You stumble over the configuration for a “Right Y” axis. You ask yourself, “Why on earth would I need another Y axis?” You toggle it back and forth and change some settings, yet that makes no difference to your graph. What gives? Never fear.

Certificates can be difficult to track and opaque to administrators, and if any expire without someone noticing, embarrassing outages can happen. At Grafana Labs we strive to make all things visible and observable; why should certificates be any exception? In this post we will explore an easy way to expose and monitor certificate expirations using Grafana and Prometheus.

Grafana Labs cofounder and CEO Raj Dutt was a recent guest on the Designing Enterprise Platforms podcast from Early Adopter Research (EAR), speaking to host Dan Woods about the benefits of observability. The conversation touched on several related topics – including the tactics of observability, platform approaches, and why now is a great time to be part of an open source company.

There has long been a request from administrators to have the ability to enforce a minimum interval between alert rule evaluations. This is useful for restricting unrealistic user-defined alert rules that evaluate too often and create unnecessary load in the backend. @Uepoch took the initiative and made all the necessary modifications for this configuration in Grafana’s backend, and we finally pushed it forward and introduced the feature in Grafana v6.6.

Stefano Mitchell is a customer support engineer at SkySilk Cloud Services. It’s no secret that there is a correlation between a team having quick access to metrics and swift resolutions. Accurate monitoring metrics displayed in a clear and efficient manner help your teams respond to alerts and issues as they arise in real time. SkySilk Cloud Services, a cloud services provider, uses Grafana dashboards internally to maintain a strong overview of regional system health.

Grafana dashboards can do a lot, but do you know how much more you can get out of them by configuring them as code? That was the topic of a recent FOSDEM 2020 talk by Grafana software developer Malcolm Holmes and Julien Pivotto, an open source consultant at Inuits. In their presentation, the pair discussed Grafonnet (a Jsonnet library to generate Grafana dashboards), provided tips and tricks about how to use it efficiently, and explained how to fully manage your Grafana instances from code.

In my previous blog post, “How to Explore Prometheus with Easy ‘Hello World’ Projects”, I described three projects that I used to get a better sense of what Prometheus can do. In this post, I’d like to share how I got more familiar with Prometheus Alertmanager and how I set up alert notifications for Slack, PagerDuty, and Gmail.