Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When Patrick O’Brien interviewed to become a Site Reliability Engineer at The Trade Desk™, it was clear that taking the company’s monitoring system to the next level was the priority. “A chunk of my interview was about The Trade Desk’s previous monitoring system and how to scale it,” says O’Brien, who joined The Trade Desk more than two years ago. “I had a good feeling that would be an early task.”

The goal of Grafana has always been to help people feel in control of their observability infrastructure. Users come in with an alert; that takes them to a dashboard; they use ad hoc querying; and then they use log aggregation or distributed tracing to come up with a fix that will resolve an incident or issue.

At Grafana Labs, we are always working on optimizing query time on our Grafana Cloud hosted metrics platform, which incorporates our Metrictank Graphite-compatible metrics service, and Cortex, the open source project for multitenant, horizontally scalable Prometheus-as-a-Service.

With the recent release of Grafana 6.3 substantial refactoring and improvements to plugins, external auth systems, and permissions have been introduced in Grafana Enterprise. Let’s take a look at some of the latest Enterprise features here.

We are building Grafana Labs to be a sustainable open source company. In addition to maintaining the open source project and community around Grafana, we offer paid products that help make that possible. Grafana Enterprise was introduced over a year ago and adds features needed by enterprise-level organizations. In this blog post we’ll discuss some of those features and how we decide what goes into Grafana Enterprise.

Before Grafana, there was Kibana 3. Kibana was revolutionary when it came out, because it allowed you to use Elasticsearch in a very new way, for log analytics and not just normal document search, and to build dashboards without writing JSON documents. It had this nice UI, which let you drag panels around. But editing panels was a little tricky; you could only edit them in this sort of fullscreen modal. Still, it was really good for its time.

Today we are releasing Grafana 5.4.5 and 6.3.4. These patch releases include an important security fix that affects all Grafana versions between 2.0.0 and 6.3.3.

At Grafana Labs, we constantly look for new opportunities to enhance workflows for our users. Our mission is for Grafana to be the missing piece in your system and a link between the three pillars of observability. No matter what your observability stack is composed of, we want Grafana to be the answer for bridging the gaps between metrics, logs, and traces.

Performance is one of those things that most people will agree is super important, but nevertheless tends to get overlooked. In light of that, I wanted to share the approach we recently took with auditing the Grafana product’s performance, and how we went about trying to improve it.

For many years I have been using an application called OSSEC for monitoring my home network. The output of the application is primarily email alerts which are perfect for seeing events in near real-time. In this post, I’ll be showing you how to build a good high-level view of these alerts over time with Loki, Prometheus, and Grafana.