September 2018 Summaries

Grafana's latest issue of TimeShift announces significant updates, including the release of Grafana 5.2.4 with bug fixes and the beta release of Grafana 5.3.0, which introduces new features like notification reminders, enhanced dashboard modes, and support for GitLab OAuth filtering by groups. The announcement also highlights the availability of early bird tickets for GrafanaCon LA, scheduled for February 2019, and encourages proposals for talks. The blogosphere section discusses various articles and presentations, such as benefits of attending GrafanaCon, utilizing Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring, and automating Grafana dashboard imports. An update to the New Relic Datasource plugin adds annotation queries, enhancing Grafana's visualization capabilities. Upcoming events like All Things Open 2018 and KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America are also featured, showcasing Grafana's role in the open-source and cloud-native communities. Finally, Grafana Labs announces job openings, inviting individuals passionate about open-source software and observability to join their team.

GrafanaCon LA 2019, scheduled for February 25-26 in Los Angeles, offers a wealth of learning and networking opportunities for attendees interested in open-source monitoring tools and best practices. The conference features a diverse range of talks from industry leaders, covering topics like monitoring infrastructure and new tools in the Grafana ecosystem, while also providing hands-on demos and tutorials. GrafanaCon is not only a chance to learn from companies like eBay and Uber but also a venue to meet and interact with like-minded professionals, enhancing both professional and personal growth. Attendees are encouraged to share their own experiences and learnings with colleagues, thereby fostering a collaborative and supportive community. Despite the potential costs associated with attending, the conference promises valuable insights, industry connections, and inspiration that can significantly benefit both individual careers and business success.

TimeShift's 61st issue, compiled by Trent White, delves into the latest developments in Grafana, highlighting its alpha Explore UI, which enhances data exploration with Prometheus queries while maintaining dashboard integrity. The newsletter covers Grafana's recent releases, including the stable version 5.2.4 with bug fixes and the beta version 5.3.0beta-1, which introduces features such as alert notification reminders and a graphical query builder for Postgres. Additionally, the issue explores various user experiences with Grafana, such as Logicify's use of Grafana for diverse monitoring purposes and building a centralized monitoring stack with Prometheus and Grafana on Docker. The newsletter also promotes upcoming events like GrafanaCon LA and features talks on Grafana-related topics at conferences around the world, alongside an invitation for proposals and open positions at Grafana Labs. The issue concludes with a tweet highlighting a user's experience with Grafana in monitoring AWS RDS storage usage.

Grafana's Explore UI is a new feature designed to enhance data exploration and troubleshooting processes by allowing users to interactively iterate through Prometheus queries without altering their dashboards. This tool is part of Grafana's transition from a dashboarding solution to a broader observability platform, as highlighted by David Kaltschmidt, Director of UX at Grafana Labs, during a presentation at PromCon. The Explore UI introduces a query-centric view and includes features such as a metrics explorer, query hints for easier navigation, and the ability to filter and drill down with a single click. It supports new Prometheus API features, such as recording rules, and allows for comparisons between different Prometheus instances using a split view. While still in its alpha phase, Explore UI is accessible through a feature flag in the latest Docker image of Grafana and is anticipated to be released with Grafana v6.0. The interface aims to make query building more intuitive, particularly for novices, and includes functionalities like faceted search within queries and a history of recent queries to enhance user experience.

TimeShift Issue 60, released on September 15, 2018, discusses various updates and articles related to Grafana and the open-source monitoring ecosystem. The newsletter highlights Grafana's latest stable and beta releases, version 5.2.4 and 5.3.0beta-1, featuring bug fixes and new functionalities like alert notifications and Gitlab OAuth support. It includes insights from the blogosphere, such as monitoring mixins for Grafana dashboards and Prometheus alerts, using Grafana alerts for software license expiration, and visualizing IoT sensor data. Additionally, upcoming events like GrafanaCon LA, various workshops, and conferences are promoted, offering opportunities to learn more about monitoring with Grafana and Prometheus. The issue also shares updates on plugin enhancements and invites readers to join the Grafana Labs team by viewing open positions.

Monitoring mixins, as discussed by Tom Wilkie at PromCon in Munich, offer a solution for creating reusable templates for Grafana dashboards and Prometheus alerts, addressing common issues with mismatched labels. These mixins allow for dynamic configuration by separating labels from the alert and dashboard templates, enabling easier updates and customization. Wilkie explored various methods for achieving this flexibility, ultimately favoring Jsonnet for its ability to handle variables, conditionals, and merges in configurations, which simplifies the integration of mixins. Jsonnet's capabilities allow users to override default settings, adapting to changes in upstream labels without manually reconfiguring alerts and dashboards. To facilitate the use and management of these mixins, a package manager called Jsonnet-bundler was developed, inspired by existing package management tools. This innovation has led to the creation of widely adopted mixins like the Kubernetes mixin, which has garnered contributions from major organizations and is set to be incorporated into future OpenShift versions. The concept of mixins is gaining traction within the community, with new contributors developing mixins for various applications, including unexpected domains like NASA's space weather monitoring.

TimeShift, a newsletter from Grafana Labs, highlights recent updates and activities related to its open-source monitoring and visualization platform. The latest issue announces the release of Grafana 5.2.4, which includes bug fixes for Grafana-cli, and the beta release of Grafana 5.3.0, featuring new alerting and dashboard features, enhanced OAuth support, and a graphical query builder for Postgres. The newsletter also invites readers to submit content suggestions and highlights upcoming events like GrafanaCon LA 2019 and various conferences where Grafana Labs will participate. Additionally, it features blog posts on topics such as telemetry for tea and monitoring with Kubernetes, and announces new job openings at Grafana Labs.