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Everything You Need to Know About the Grafana-Prometheus-GitLab Integration

You probably missed it. Don’t feel bad. It was just one small paragraph, buried in the GitLab 11.9 Omnibus Release Notes: Grafana is now bundled in our Omnibus package, making it easier than ever to understand how your instance is performing. “Omnibus” is what GitLab calls its main installation package, and “Grafana” is the time-series visualization software, but what does this paragraph even mean?

How to Migrate Your Configuration Database

Grafana by default uses sqlite3 as a local database to hold the configuration information (such as users, dashboards, alerts, etc.). But did you know you can also use other databases for this purpose? Many large customers prefer to use either Postgresql or MySQL/MariaDB, and we recently had a request from a company wanting some help to migrate their configuration data from Postgresql to MySQL. This is not a common request, so we didn’t have any pre-existing tooling to do it.

Lock-free Observations for Prometheus Histograms

There’s a famous Go proverb that states: Don’t communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating. At GopherCon UK 2019, Björn Rabenstein, an engineer at Grafana and a Prometheus developer, told the audience that when it comes to observations for Prometheus histograms, that saying doesn’t hold true.