Armin Müller is the co-founder of ScopeSET. ScopeSET specializes in R&D work to build and integrate tools in the model-based systems engineering domain, with a track record of more than 15 years of delivering innovative solutions for ESA and the aerospace industry. Training machine learning models takes a lot of time, so we’re always looking for ways to accelerate the process at ScopeSET. We use open source components to build research and development tools for technical companies.

It may seem like ancient history, but there was a time when telecommunications companies only had to worry about connecting customers over landlines. Today, their businesses depend on vast cellular networks to not only provide strong wireless phone coverage in countless locations, but also handle the demands of tablets, computers, and machine-to-machine communications.

When COVID-19 hit, Yonatan Mevorach faced an unexpected challenge, which required an unexpected solution. The Infrastructure Team Lead at Wix, the popular website building platform, was accustomed to looking at multiple monitors on the walls of the software company’s offices in Tel Aviv, Israel. These monitors cycled through Grafana dashboards to help the team keep tabs on Wix’s many services.

Alerting infrastructure is often complex, with many pieces of the pipeline that often live in different places. Scaling this across many teams and organizations is an especially challenging task. As organizations grow in size, the observability component tends to grow along with it. For example, you may have many components, each of which needs a different set of alerts. You may have several teams, each with a different channel where notifications should be delivered.

Heroku is a cloud provider well known for its simplicity and its support out of the box for multiple programming languages. When thinking about consuming logs from applications hosted in Heroku, Grafana Loki is a great choice. But in the past, shipping logs from Heroku to any Loki instance required ad-hoc scripts to fiddle with Heroku’s logs format and send them. This can be a time-consuming experience.

Metrics are the cornerstone of an observable system – they tell you a system’s measured outputs, granting visibility into what your customers are experiencing and when there’s a problem. However, not all methods for recording and saving metrics from a system’s output are alike. The best method for shipping your system’s metrics to Grafana Cloud depends on many factors, varying from the source of your metrics data to your familiarity with observability tools.

Here at Grafana Labs, we’re always striving to reduce the amount of effort needed to maintain plugins across different versions of Grafana. That is why we’re excited to provide you with a tool to check the compatibility of your plugin with the latest Grafana plugins API. We know that it can be frustrating for developers to find out people can’t use their plugins. Over the past few months, we’ve been working on detecting the breaking changes as soon as they happen.

We are thrilled to announce that Grafana Incident is now generally available to all Grafana Cloud users, including our generous free tier. (You can sign up for a free Grafana Cloud account now.)